CORTEZ, Colo. (AP) -- Mystery writer Tony Hillerman's newest novel, inspired by a lengthy search for three alleged cop killers in the Four Corners area, has many fans. Cortez Police Chief Roy Lane isn't one of them.
"Hunter Badger," the fastest-selling book yet in Hillerman's series of Navajo police tales, is dedicated to "officer Dale Claxton who died doing his duty, bravely and alone."But later, in an author's note, Hillerman is highly critical of the way the desert manhunt was handled, echoing some of the charges made by Navajo tribal police.
"I'm not even going to read the book," Lane said Friday.
The novel is an outgrowth of the May 1998 slaying of Cortez police officer Dale Claxton. It recalls the biggest manhunt in Southwest history.
The book was released one week after the Oct. 31 discovery on a Southeast Utah bluff of the remains of Alan Pilon, the second of the three alleged killers whose bodies were found in the area. The third remains missing.
"Pretty good timing, wasn't it?" Hillerman, 74, said last week in a telephone interview from his Albuquerque home. "My editor said, 'How'd you manage that?' "
The story is fiction. Hillerman makes up a new crime for retired Navajo Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn and young Navajo Police Sgt. Jim Chee to solve, and solve it they do.
The story's details evoke parts of the real-life manhunt. References to it are sprinkled throughout the story.
In the author's note at the start of the book, Hillerman recounts facts of the manhunt: the theft of a water truck in Ignacio, the rapid-fire shooting of Claxton, the assembly of more than 500 officers to comb the canyon country west of Cortez for the killers.
He then portrays an unflattering picture of the manhunt degenerating into what Navajo Tribal Police Chief Leonard Butler called "a circus."
Hillerman writes: "Sighting reports sent to the coordinator were not reaching search teams. Search parties found themselves tracking one another, unable to communicate on mismatched radio frequencies. Local police who knew the country sat at roadblocks while teams brought in from the cities were floundering in canyons strange to them. The town of Bluff was evacuated, a brush fire was set in the San Juan bottoms to smoke out the fugitives, and the hunt dragged on into the summer.
"The word spread in July that the FBI believed the fugitives dead (possibly of laughter, one of my cop friends said). By August, only the Navajo Police still had scouts out looking for signs."
Lane, the Cortez police chief, said the FBI never took over the manhunt. It was always coordinated by sheriff's departments, he said.
Lane also said the manhunt never became "a circus" and said local police were not relegated to roadblocks. But search parties were hampered by mismatched radio frequencies, he said.
"I understand he's a good novelist and a great writer," Lane said.
"He wants to run law enforcement down, it seems to me. He could have done better research before he wrote the book."
The book spins a yarn about three men who hold up the Ute Mountain Ute Casino in Towaoc, killing an employee and wounding a security guard who happens to be an off-duty police officer. Leaphorn and Chee then circumvent the FBI to find the killers in a remote canyon.
Hillerman said he visited the reservation and Bluff soon after the manhunt subsided, talking to police and townspeople, "just to get a feel for it. I knew right away I didn't want to write about the manhunt itself," he said. "I really don't like to fictionalize that stuff."