Spider Woman's Daughter - Anne Hillerman

    2013; 416 pages.  New Author? : Yes, but she’s Tony Hillerman’s daughter, and I’ve read his books.  Book #19 (out of 22) in the “Leaphorn and Chee (and Manuelito)” series.  Genre : Murder-Mystery; Native American Fiction.  Laurels : Winner of the 2014 Spur Award for Best First Novel from the Western Writers of America; New York Times Best Seller list.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    Someone has just shot retired Navajo Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn!  Right there in the parking lot of the Navajo Inn in Window Rock, Arizona, as he walked to his car after a breakfast with several of his former police colleagues.

    Who would want to do such a thing?  After all, he’s retired now.  Most likely it’s someone he helped put away in prison years ago.  If that’s the case, the list of suspects may be pretty long.  Or maybe it has to do with some job he’s working on at present.  He still does consulting work as a freelance investigator.

    It certainly wasn’t an accident.  The perpetrator jumped out of a blue car with Arizona license plates, pulled a gun, plugged Leaphorn right in the head, then jumped back in the car and sped away.  We know all this because Officer Bernadette “Bernie” Manuelito watched the whole thing unfold from the restaurant’s lobby.

    That bit of serendipity may have saved Leaphorn’s life for now.  But it might only be temporary, since the Window Rock medical facilities are not equipped for the immediate surgery and follow-up intensive care that Leaphorn desperately needs.

    But we may be overthinking all this.  Leaphorn’s live-in girlfriend, Louisa Bourebonette, recently left town after a spat with him, reportedly heading for Houston.

    And she’s not taking phone calls, and not making her present whereabouts available to anyone.

What’s To Like...

    Spider Woman’s Daughter is the 19^th book in Tony Hillerman’s “Leaphorn and Chee” series, and the first one to be written and published after he passed away, with his daughter, Anne Hillerman, taking over as author.  I’ve read four of Tony’s books, and I was curious to see how closely Anne would stay true to the style, content, and storytelling of her father.

   The action starts off right away.  Leaphorn gets shot in the first couple pages, and the fact that his fellow police officers were at the scene when it happened means the hunt is on almost immediately.  As always in this series, the setting for the book is the Four Corners area of the US Southwest, with a lot of the events taking place in Window Rock, Arizona, and Shiprock, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

    The main storyline of course is trying to figure out who shot Joe Leaphorn and why.  But there are a bunch of secondary threads as well.  Why are Jackson and Nez so hard to locate?  What is Louisa hiding?  How the heck does the cat tie in with things?  And how does AIRC (the “American Indian Resource Center”) fit into all this?

     I enjoyed the various Navajo phrases that are scattered throughout the book.  “Yah Ta Hey”, I’m familiar with from my college days.  Here there was also the greeting  “Ya’ at’ eeh”, which I presume is a variant of Yah Ta Hey; Diné (“the People”); “hataalii” (a medicine man); “bilagaana” (anyone who is non-Navajo), and several others.  I’ve skipped most of the accent marks in these words.

    It was fun to learn about Hosteen Klah, a famous Navajo artist, weaver, and medicine man that I’d never heard of.  Wikipedia has a page devoted to him, which helped enlighten me.  And I enjoyed sitting in on the healing ceremony that takes place at the hospital for Joe Leaphorn.

    Since I live in Arizona, the reference to the local grocery chain called Basha’s brings back memories, since I'm pretty sure it’s no longer around.  The musical nods to Bruno Mars and Janis Joplin were also neat, although it appears the author is not a big fan of the latter.  And when it’s hot here in Arizona, you really don’t want to mess with other people’s Fudgsicles.

    The 416 pages are divided up into 22 chapters.  Spider Woman’s Daughter is both a standalone novel and a part of a 22-book series.

Excerpts...

    “He shares his house with a lady friend, Louisa.”

    Cordova raised his eyebrows.

    “Louisa Bourebonette.”

    “Bourebonette?  A French Navajo?”

    “Not Navajo,” Bernie said.  “She’s a white woman, an anthropologist.”  Bernie thought of the old joke from Anthro 101: Every Navajo family includes Mom, Dad, four kids, and an anthropologist.  (loc. 203)

    “Isn’t this a new visitor center?”

    “It opened a few years ago.  The old building you remember had to be razed.”

    “Old?  Wasn’t it built in the late nineteen-fifties?”

    “Ironic, isn’t it?  Modern America couldn’t build a visitor center to last seventy years,” Stephen said.  “These Pueblo buildings still stand after more than a thousand.  But this time we did it right.  We brought in an Indian to bless the site.”  (loc. 2923)

Kindle Details...

    Spider Woman’s Daughter sells for $9.99 at Amazon, which is the same price you’d pay for the second and third books that she’s written in this series.  Her fourth and latest book, Cave of Bones, sells for $12.99, and was released last April.

“Life is full of if-onlys.”  (loc. 186)

    The ending has its pluses and minuses.  On the positive side, it’s suitably exciting, with a couple of red herrings to keep you on your toes.  Some parts of it are a bit over-the-top, but that just enhances the thrills and spills.

    On the down side, the perpetrator really needs to watch the Austin Powers movies and learn from them.  When you’ve captured the hero police detectives that have been chasing you, just shoot them already.  And if you’re not going to do that, at least don’t explain to them WHY you did it, and HOW you pulled it off.  Because, in the overwhelmingly likely event that they do escape the diabolical death trap you've created for them, prosecuting you will be an incredibly easy task.

    I call that last part a “Perry Mason” ending if you’ve ever read or watched that Erle Stanley Gardner series.  In fairness, it should be noted that Tony Hillerman routinely used that literary device as well.  It isn’t very realistic, but it does tie up plot threads efficiently.

    7½ Stars.  If you’ve loved Tony Hillerman’s books in this series and are worried about someone taking over the writing task, I have good news for you.  The transition from father to daughter in the authorship is smooth and seamless.  There’s no drop-off in the quality of the writing and little change in the style as Anne Hillerman takes up the pen.  I get the impression that Joe Leaphorn is being gradually phased out and replaced by Bernie Manuelito, but this started when Tony was still writing the stories.  About the only time I sensed a different author was when an entire page was devoted to Bernie musing about how her marriage to Jim Chee was being strained by both of them working on the Navajo Police Force.

    No male author would take that much time to write about that.  Which does not necessarily make it a bad thing.