Hunting Badger

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The marvelous Hunting Badger is Tony Hillerman's 14th novel featuring Navajo tribal police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Here the two cops (who appeared in separate books early on but whose paths now cross routinely) are working two angles of the same case to catch the right-wing militiamen who pulled off a violent heist at an Indian casino. Hillerman serves up plenty of action and enough plot twists to keep readers off balance, leading up to a satisfyingly tense climax in which Leaphorn and Chee stalk a killer in his hideout. But through it all, the cardinal Hillerman virtues are in evidence: economical, pellucid prose; a panoply of Indian-country characters who seem to rise right up off the page; vivid evocations of the Southwest's bleak beauty; and rich insights into Navajo life and culture. (Hillerman once told an interviewer that the highest compliment he'd ever received was many Navajo readers' assumption that he himself is Navajo--he's not.)

While first-time readers will find plenty to enjoy in Hunting Badger, it holds special pleasures for longtime fans. There's more and deeper contact between Leaphorn and Chee, and we continue to see further into the prickly Leaphorn's human side (though without fuss or sentimentality). Chee finally begins to get over Janet Pete (it took about six books) and inch toward a new love interest. And in a moving section involving Chee's spiritual teacher Frank Sam Nakai, the shaman provides a key insight into the case.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
November 1999

Ed Gorman Reviews Tony Hillerman's Hunting Badger

Not all masters of the form get better as their careers move along. Some get sloppy, some just seem to fall out of touch with readers, and some just give up writing altogether.

Not Tony Hillerman.

It's interesting that the opening chapter of his last novel (The First Eagle) reads a bit like Robin Cook with its medical speculations, and that his new book, Hunting Badger, has the air of a political thriller. Rather than repeat himself, Hillerman appears to be pushing in new and exciting directions.

In its simplest form, Hunting Badger is a novel about the collision of two law enforcement agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (or The Federal Bureau of Ineptitude, as some call it) and the cops of the Navajo Indian reservation. Both groups are hunting for the men who robbed a casino and killed a police officer in the process. They could be hiding anywhere in the vast search area.

Hillerman has certainly shown displeasure before, if not anger, with the way the federal government deals with reservation law and methods — the Great White Father of Washington telling all the heathens how to do things. But I can't recall any other Hillerman novel that seems so forthrightly scornful of the feds. And, in Hillerman's version of events (an actual manhunt inspired this book), it's the kind of well-deserved scorn people felt after the needless slaughter and cover-up by the FBI at Waco. Maybe becauseI'mstill angry about Waco myself, or maybe because I'm a political thriller junkie, I think this is the most spellbinding novel Hillerman has ever written, especially since he brings the retired Joe Leaphorn back onstage.

It's a breathless and informative read — the strutting feds out for glory, sometimes so obsessed with style and good press that the manhunt seems irrelevant — and Leaphorn and Jim Chee remembering Navajo and Ute myths and allegories that seem to be a subtext for the manhunt here. Talk about your cultural collision.

This is an angry, dramatic, sly, wry, honest, and flawlessly composed novel that could make a great movie in tradition of "The Fugitive." Are you listening, Hollywood? Hillerman's always been a master. He just took his mastery up another notch.

—Ed Gorman

Ed Gorman's latest novels include Daughter of Darkness, Harlot's Moon, and Black River Falls, the latter of which "proves Gorman's mastery of the pure suspense novel," says Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. ABC-TV has optioned the novel as a movie. Gorman is also the editor of Mystery Scene magazine, which Stephen King calls "indispensable" for mystery readers.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In 1998 three heavily armed "survivalists" came out of the Four Corners canyons in a stolen truck. They murdered a policeman, had a shootout with pursuers, and then vanished - eluding a manhunt that eventually involved hundreds of officers from more than twenty federal and state agencies. The crime and the bungled FBI investigation left behind a web of mysteries: Why did one of the bandits kill himself? How did the others escape? Why has no one in this impoverished area claimed the huge reward the government still offers? Most puzzling of all, what crime were they en route to commit when Officer Dale Claxton stopped them - and paid for his bravery with his life?" "Tony Hillerman assigns these real puzzles to his fictional Navajo Tribal Police officers - Sergeant Jim Chee and retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. The time is now, and the memory of the mishandled manhunt of 1998 is still painfully fresh. Three men stage a predawn raid on the Ute tribe's gambling casino. They kill one policeman, wound another, and disappear in the maze of canyons on the Utah-Arizona border. The FBI takes over the investigation, and agents swarm in with their helicopters, their high-tech equipment, and a theory of the crime that makes a wounded deputy sheriff a suspect. This development calls Chee in from his vacation, and a request for a favor draws in Leaphorn. Chee finds a fatal flaw in the federal theory, and Leaphorn sees an intriguing pattern connecting this crime with the exploits of a legendary Ute hero-bandit.

SYNOPSIS

Loaded with e-book extras (not available in the print edition), including Tony Hillerman's running commentary on his work, his series heroes Leaphorn and Chee, and a special profile of the Navajo nation.

FROM THE CRITICS

Tom Nolan

Part of the appeal of Tony Hillerman's wonderfully satisfying police-procedural novels set in the Four Corners area of the American Southwest that a reader can depend on having certain expectations met. Mr. Hillerman has a knack for making his continuing characters as interesting as the crimes they solve. Even before Chee and Leaphorn are done Hunting Badger, the reader is longing to be with them next ime, patroling those starkly beautiful sagebrush flats and sandstone cliffs.

Library Journal

Inspired by an actual 1998 manhunt on the Utah-Arizona border in which the FBI bungled the search for the killers of a police officer, Hillerman's (The First Eagle) latest mystery opens with the robbery of the Ute casino. The head of security is killed; a Navajo police officer working off-duty as a rent-a-cop is wounded; and the perpetrators flee into canyon country. Back from vacation, Jim Chee is reluctantly drawn into the hunt for the three men when officer Bernadette Manuelito, who has a crush on Chee, asks him to investigate the crime because Teddy Bai, the wounded officer, has been accused of being the inside man. Likewise, retired Lt. Joe Leaphorn gets involved when a rancher gives him the names of the perpetrators. What made Hillerman's early novels so compelling was the unique blend of Navajo lore, evocative Southwestern landscape, and intriguing mysteries. Unfortunately, in his later books the formula has grown stale; Hunting Badger offers a paint-by-the-numbers plot with cardboard villains. Still, diehard fans will want this. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/99.]--Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Jon L. Breen - Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine