Showing posts with label character Lt. Joe Leaphorn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label character Lt. Joe Leaphorn. Show all posts

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Rock with Wings

Rock with Wings by Anne Hillerman  322 pp.

Anne Hillerman continues writing stories of the characters created by her late father. In general she does a good job, unfortunately in this book there are a few too many "criminal" activities going on and some feel unnecessary. Navajo police officers and husband and wife, Bernadette Manuelito and Jim Chee attempt to take a much needed vacation to Monument Valley. Plans go awry when Bernie has to return home because her alcoholic sister has disappeared. Chee ends up filling in with the local police station tasked with providing security and keeping a motion picture crew in line. When a member of the film staff goes missing Chee finds her and the two of them literally stumble across a new grave. In the meantime, Bernie goes back to work and is offered a bribe during a traffic stop. Chee's former partner, the retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is still recovering from a gunshot wound to the head. He is frail and unable to speak but aids his old partner and Bernie by doing research for them on the computer. In a convoluted plot involving money laundering, blood stains in a hotel room, solar power, endangered species, skinwalkers, and murder, Hillerman manages to tie it all up in the end. I listened to the audio book version and was disappointed in the narrator. The books by Tony Hillerman were read by the imcomparable George Guidall. This one was read by Christine Delaine who did an acceptable but not great job of it.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Spider Woman's Daughter

Spider Woman's Daughter: A Leaphorn and Chee Novel by Anne Hillerman  305 pp.

Anne Hillerman has picked up her late father's mantle to continue his popular mystery series. I have to say she has done an admirable job. There is a slight indefinable quality that seems missing but I can't explain what that is. This story revisits characters from Tony Hillerman's 1988 novel A Thief of Time but this time it is retired Navajo Tribal Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn who is the victim, gunned down in front of Officer Bernie Manuelito, wife of Leaphorn's long time partner Sgt. Jim Chee. As Leaphorn fights for life in the hospital, Bernie and Chee search for the shooter in many of the same places in New Mexico and Arizona that appear in the earlier books of the series. Reading this was like meeting up with old friends again.