Series: Leaphorn & Chee

A- #BookReview: Shadow of the Solstice by Anne Hillerman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Shadow of the Solstice by Anne HillermanShadow of the Solstice: A Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito Novel (A Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito Novel, 10) by Anne Hillerman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, thriller
Series: Leaphorn & Chee #28, Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito #10
Pages: 336
Published by Harper on April 22, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this gripping chapter in New York Times bestselling author Anne Hillerman’s Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito series, the detectives must sort out a save-the-planet meditation group connected to a mysterious death and a nefarious scheme targeting vulnerable indigenous people living with addiction.

The Navajo Nation police are on high alert when a U.S. Cabinet Secretary schedules an unprecedented trip to the little Navajo town of Shiprock, New Mexico. The visit coincides with a plan to resume uranium mining along the Navajo Nation border. Tensions around the official’s arrival escalate when the body of a stranger is found in an area restricted for the disposal of radioactive uranium waste. Is it coincidence that a cult with a propensity for violence arrives at a private camp group outside Shiprock the same week to celebrate the summer solstice? When the outsiders’ erratic behavior makes their Navajo hosts uneasy, Officer Bernadette Manuelito is assigned to monitor the situation. She finds a young boy at grave risk, abused women, and other shocking discoveries that plunge her and Lt. Jim Chee into a volatile and deadly situation.

Meanwhile, Darleen Manuelito, Bernie’s high spirited younger sister, learns one of her home health clients is gone–and the woman’s daughter doesn’t seem to care. Darleen’s curiosity and sense of duty combine to lead her to discover that the client’s grandson is also missing and that the two have become ensnared in a wickedly complex scheme exploiting indigenous people. Darleen’s information meshes with a case Chee has begun to solve that deals with the evil underside of human nature.

My Review:

The advantage of a mystery series in which there are not just one but two highly qualified investigators is that it is possible to focus on two separate crimes and NOT have them merge into a single perpetrator or gang of perpetrators at the end.

Navajo Nation Police Lieutenant Jim Chee has been investigating a rise in disappearances across their jurisdiction. Not that adults don’t occasionally walk away from their lives no matter where they live, but this rise is considerably more than the usual, with more families than are usually left behind in such cases left bereft by the limbo of their probable loss.

At the same time, Navajo Nation Police Officer Bernadette Manuelito is investigating complaints about an unapproved and downright dangerous structure being built by a visiting “meditation” group on land that they have rented from a well-known local family.

This may not sound like all that big a deal, but a) they don’t own the land, b) the owner refused permission for them to build, c) they didn’t get their plans approved and d) the structure is a sweat lodge meant to be used for meditation and healing ceremonies and its construction is so dangerous as to be downright deadly in the wrong circumstances. Which is exactly what they’re planning to hold. That the whole setup not just looks and sounds and more importantly ACTS like a cult setting up for something either dangerous or suicidal or both makes the owners’ feel unsafe and makes Bernie’s hackles rise accordingly.

Into this already potentially explosive mix throw the possible arrival of the Secretary of Energy, probably to give a speech that will run directly contrary to Navajo Nation policy, with all the chaos that a visiting dignitary could bring – as well as the tensions arising from the lack of certainty about whether she will or she won’t.

Chee has been left in charge of whatever is going to happen, if it’s going to happen, because the station captain had a heart attack right after the potential visit was announced. He’s torn between duties, cases and family while his wife, Officer Bernie Manuelito, has turned over a really big rock and a much more dangerous snake than she expected has crawled out to strike at a bigger prize than anyone imagined.

Escape Rating A-: As much and as long as I have loved this series, it took me a bit to get into this particular entry in it for reasons that I think were a ‘me’ thing and may not be a ‘you’ thing. I was looking for more of an escape than I got this time around, as this story took me away in geography but not so much in other ways.

In other words, everything that happens in this story felt very close to ‘real’ life, and I wanted to be further away than that. Also, I was really, seriously worried for one of the characters and I needed to find out that she’d be okay before I could relax into the story. Once she managed to rescue herself, the rest of the story grabbed me and didn’t let go until the end – which was more than a bit of a nail-biter.

What made this one both so real and so fascinating was the way that even though the two cases don’t merge into one in any of the usual ways, they were both motivated by a lot of the same things – none of which were the ostensible causes of the crimes themselves.

Both crimes are about greed and manipulation, about taking advantage of people’s desire for a better life to line the pockets of the perpetrators at the expense of as many people as possible. That one is a Medicaid scam in Phoenix and the other is a cult subjugating its members even as it bilks them of their money is merely window dressing on the true motives of their perpetrators, which are to take advantage of people – and the government in the case of the Medicaid scam – and line their own pockets.

That one perpetrator is coldly, cruelly sane while the other believes he’s getting messages from a higher power – or at least pretends to – doesn’t mean that they’re not operating from surprisingly similar playbooks in the end.

And ending which administers just desserts to both, even though it’s not remotely possible to truly balance the scales in either case. Which comes back, again, to just how closely reality bites this fictional setting.

Over the more than OMG 30 years that I’ve been following this series (the series began in 1970 with The Blessing Way but I didn’t get hooked on it until the early 1990s) the more I’ve enjoyed getting to know these characters and have loved watching them grow and change over the years. When the series began, the ‘Legendary’ Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn was the protagonist and young Officer Jim Chee was his sometimes reluctant sidekick. Now Chee is the lead investigator, his wife and fellow officer Bernie is NOT his sidekick but an investigator in her own right. They face a whole new set of challenges, often separately on the job but together in their relationship, while behind them a new crop of officers is learning the ropes and their world is changing – as the world does. (And if any of this sounds familiar that might be because the original stories are the basis for the TV series Dark Winds.)

But humans are always gonna human, there will always be more problems for them to face and crimes for them to solve, and I’ll always be looking forward to the next book in the series whenever it appears. Hopefully, that will be this time next year.

Grade A #BookReview: Lost Birds by Anne Hillerman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Lost Birds by Anne HillermanLost Birds (Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito #27) by Anne Hillerman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, thriller
Series: Leaphorn & Chee #27, Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito #9
Pages: 304
Published by Harper on April 23, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From New York Times bestselling author Anne Hillerman, a thrilling and moving chapter in the Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito series involving several emotionally complex cases that will test the detectives in different ways. Joe Leaphorn may be long retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, but his detective skills are still sharp, honed by his work as a private detective. His experience will be essential to solve a compelling new finding the birth parents of a woman who was raised by a bilagáana family but believes she is Diné based on one solid clue, an old photograph with a classic Navajo child’s blanket. Leaphorn discovers that his client’s adoption was questionable, and her adoptive family not what they seem. His quest for answers takes him to an old trading post and leads him to a deadly cache of long-buried family secrets. As that case grows more complicated, Leaphorn receives an unexpected call from a person he met decades earlier. Cecil Bowleg’s desperation is clear in his voice, but just as he begins to explain, the call is cut off by an explosion and Cecil disappears. True to his nature, Leaphorn is determined to find the truth even as the situation grows dangerous. Investigation of the explosion falls in part to Officer Bernadette Manuelito, who discovers an unexpected link to Cecil’s missing wife. Bernie also is involved in a troubling investigation of her an elderly weaver whose prize-winning sheep have been ruthlessly killed by feral dogs. Exploring the emotionally complex issues of adoption of Indigenous children by non-native parents, Anne Hillerman delivers another thought-provoking, gripping mystery that brings to life the vivid terrain of the American Southwest, its people, and the lore and traditions that make it distinct.

My Review:

“We grow too soon old and too late smart,” a saying that has its roots far from the Navajo tribal lands in the Four Corners area, but nevertheless applies to many of the characters in this 27th entry in the long-running Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito series.

Especially, but absolutely not exclusively, to the ‘Legendary Lieutenant’ himself, retired Navajo Nation Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn – the original protagonist of this series back when it began back in 1970 in The Blessing Way, written by author Anne Hillerman’s father Tony Hillerman.

As this series is written in a kind of ‘perpetual now’, Leaphorn isn’t quite as old as the number of years between 1970 and 2024 would lead one to expect, But he has aged from a man in his prime into retirement – and the start of a second career as a private investigator.

He’s not as young or as fast as he used to be – even if he’s not always willing to admit it – while the first young officer he mentored, Jim Chee, has just been promoted to Lieutenant himself. Leaphorn’s other mentee, Officer Bernie Manuelito, now Chee’s wife, is still grieving a miscarriage, and stinging after losing out on a promotion of her own.

The case they ALL find themselves working on – if not always together – begins with an explosion at a local school. Joe is on the phone with the survivor of one of his earliest cases when he hears the explosion through the phone, the call drops – or the caller does, and Joe is left hanging.

Bernie gets called to the school, because the place is on fire – or at least one specific building is. She’s had some training in dealing with explosions and their aftermath – and this case unfortunately looks like an occasion for her to use those skills.

Which is exactly what it turns out to be. Which is also the last straightforward aspect of the whole case. The ONLY saving grace to the disaster is that it happened on a Saturday morning and no students were present to be caught up in the flames.

With the increasing amount of violence on all school campuses across the country, the Navajo Police, the FBI, and every other possible jurisdiction fear that the conflagration was both cleverly and deliberately set. And they could be right. There are certainly plenty of signs that point that way – including the absence of a custodian with a whole lot of financially troubling motives for something nefarious.

Or, as much as Leaphorn and the cops he trained do not believe in coincidences, that chain of terrible events could be the result of them. After all, the other case that Leaphorn is working on turns out to be riddled with them – to considerably better results.

But it’s the much too personal case that catches up to Leaphorn that forcibly reminds him that time is catching up to him – and that there are some things it is best to say before it is too late.

Escape Rating A: Just as there are three investigators in this story, there are three cases, but the cases are not in parallel, do not intersect and mostly lead back to Joe Leaphorn, which is fitting as he is the place where the whole series began.

The big case, the official investigation into the explosion and fire at the school, is the case that takes up the least of Leaphorn’s time but the most of Bernie Manuelito’s time and effort – and pushes her up against her issues with her job disappointment and her new boss.

But the case of the explosion is the case with the largest number of facets in the present, and the only part that doesn’t do a deep dive into any of the investigators’ pasts or personal lives. Which is a good thing because there is plenty of that on the parts of all of the potential suspects.

That part of the case is interesting because the track it goes down isn’t remotely fruitful – and yet it manages to lead to the correct result in spite of itself and everyone’s assumptions about the hows and the whys of the thing. There turn out to be plenty of arrests to go around – but not for any of the reasons that anyone first suspects.

Leaphorn’s private case is the one that delves into a bit of history, and rights a single tragedy in a vast sea of wrongs that no one has the power to fix in its entirety. It’s this case that the book is titled after, as a “Lost Bird” in the Navajo context is a child who was adopted out of their tribal community. Joe’s client may be one of those “Lost Birds”, one who is determined to find out as much of the truth as is still there to find before everyone left who might have known a bit of that truth passes away.

Last, but not least, are the personal aspects of this series. While Bernie’s ongoing struggle to balance her career as a police officer alongside of her more traditional obligations as daughter and sister often features in this series, and a further chapter of her difficulty in managing that balancing act does occur, the big personal ‘case’ in this case is Leaphorn’s – which is a surprise and a revelation because Leaphorn is a person who very much keeps himself to himself – and this time that’s impossible.

All of which made Lost Birds another enthralling chapter in this long-running saga. While I don’t think a new reader would need to start back at the very, very beginning, picking this series up with Spider Woman’s Daughter, the story where Anne Hillerman picks up her father’s legacy just as Bernie Manuelito investigates the shooting of her mentor and father-figure Leaphorn is a great place to begin.

This entry in the series feels like it might be Joe Leaphorn’s swan song. He comes to some conclusions at the end that leave the impression that he’s going to move from his second act as a private investigator to a third act as a consultant – one that will hopefully put him less in the line of fire. Not that I think the series is going to end – please no – but rather that his role is going to be a bit more reduced. Whatever happens, I’m certainly looking forward to finding out – hopefully this time next year.