A new mystery from Tony Hillerman is an event, thanks to the solid reputation he created by relying on his love of the Southwest and of the Indian culture.
Hillerman owns 11 best sellers, including the excellent "A Thief of Time" and "Talking God." After reading those, his growing number of fans know they won't be reading a simple whodunnit. Instead, they will find themselves deeply immersed in a complicated and fascinating, almost alien, culture (not really the right word for American Indian, is it?).The main characters in "Coyote Waits" are Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal police, whom we have met before. Both are well educated, and while Leaphorn, a gifted detective, doesn't follow or necessarily believe in the traditional Navajo ways, Chee aspires to become a hataalii, or medicine man, learning the ancient rituals and songs. As it turns out, they need both approaches to solve their current mystery.
The story, set on the Navajo Reservation, sprawls across that lonely section of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico with no apparent regard for white men's boundaries. Dusty roads are in reality highways, a two-hour side trip through its remoteness not such a big thing for people who know the names of every wash and mountain.
A tribal police officer is killed, apparently by a kindly, aged and intoxicated Navajo who follows the traditional ways and has become something of a mother lode for cultural archaeologists. But how did he get 200 miles from his home? How did his poverty allow him to own such an expensive handgun? And why won't he even talk with the police, either to deny or affirm his guilt?
As the story unfolds it brings in such strange partners as the CIA, the FBI, Butch Cassidy and a long-forgotten Indian raid to recover horses stolen by marauding Utes.
Hillerman's great strength is his ability to create a sense of culture so strong that the reader suddenly understands events from the Navajo point of view. And in fact, the proper perspective beomes the key to resolving the mystery.
Along the way the reader becomes so caught up in the characters that when the mystery is resolved it seems almost anticlimactic.
Hillerman is good at this: "Now Hosteen Pinto was talking about how the name for Coyote in the Fourth World was not atse'ma'ii, or First Coyote, but atse'hashkke, or First Angry, and what that implied symbolically in an emerging culture in which peace and harmony were essential to survival. He talked of Coyote as the metaphor for chaos among a hungry people who would die without order . . . as the enemy of all law, and rules and harmony."
Hence the title. Coyote waits, evil biding its time.
And Hillerman is good at describing the deceptive emptiness of the redrock desert so familiar to Utahns:
"Justice, he thought, wasn't a concept that fit very well in this affair. Besides, the sun was just dipping behind the Chuskas now. On the vast, rolling prairie that led away from the highway toward the black shape of Ship Rock every clump of sagebrush, every juniper, every snakeweed, every hummock of bunch grass cast its long blue shadow - an infinity of lines of darkness undulating across the glowing landscape. Beautiful."
Be assured, a real craftsman is at work here. His creation will stay with you a long, long time. You'll never drive through the Navajo Reservation again without wondering how much you are really not seeing.