The Wailing Wind

Rating:
Summary: Tony Hillerman Wrote This Book?
Review: I've read all of Hillerman's fictional books. Maybe I've become somewhat satiated, but the last couple have been disappointing as though Hillerman has run out of something to say. Being from New Mexico, the site of the Leaphorn/Chee stories, and being fairly knowledgable about Navaho lore, customs, etc., I have (past tense) been enthralled with much of what Hillerman has had to offer in his stories in terms of background on Navaho matters as they were part of his story line. The Wailing Wind has to have been written by someone other than Hillerman, with at best Hillerman occassionally looking over their shoulder and making a comment. No character development, no background, no Navaho lore, and very little editing of the book for continuity, grammar, etc. In the space of three pages, the FBI office in Gallup moved from Coal Avenue to Gold Avenue. Numerous sentences throughout the book seem out of context, incomplete or somehow incongruous.
I mourn the passing of a great writer with much to say about a beautiful part of the southwest and an extremely interesting culture, but the Tony Hillerman that I and lots of other people have grown to love over the space of many years and many books has apparently passed on.

Rating:
Summary: Not His Best
Review: .....Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn are both featured in this novel and I was glad because I like them both. I was a little disappointed that Chee was no longer a Singer. I've learned so much about the Navajo religion from Hillerman's other books that I look forward to the tidbits of cultural information that I learn in each new book just as I enjoy learning about forensic science by reading Patricia Cornwell's books. To be able to read a good mystery AND learn something is quite a deal.

.....The mystery in this book was not as complex as Hillerman's previous mysteries. I pretty much had it figured out long before Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee did. That diminished my enjoyment somewhat. Hunting Badger was so excellent, I was expecting the same caliber of mystery. It is difficult when you are competing against yourself and Hillerman had an off day with this book.
.....Nevertheless, it was an easy read and I did enjoy it. I didn't have to force myself to pick it up each night just so I could get through it so I could go on to something else.
.....And when (if????) Hillerman writes another novel, I will snatch it off the shelf as soon as it is published. His "bad" work is still better than most author's good work.

Rating:
Summary: One book too many
Review: The depth and texture of previous books is lacking here. Chee and Leaphorn are two-dimensional. None of the emotion and angst readers have come to expect. More insights into tribal life and culture? Sorry. Almost nothing. The greatest failure in the book...telegraphing a key part of the mystery about half way through the book. I thought it was a false lead. Nope. Avid mystery readers want to be challenged as well as entertained. The Wailing Wind does neither.

Rating:
Summary: Competent, but far from Hillerman's best
Review: Those of us who are long-time Tony Hillerman fans always look forward to reading his next book. Unfortunately, this most recent Navajo police novel is less inventive than some of the earlier works in this series. The two central characters are here: Joe Leaphorn, the once legendary Lieutenant who still gets involved in cases despite his retirement, and Jim Chee, the taciturn sergeant who wants to be a Navajo religious singer. One senses that the aging Hillerman has become more interested in the older Leaphorn than in the younger Chee, who is somewhat underutilized in this story. Chee's former love interest has faded out of the picture, to be replaced by the more sympathetic policewoman Bernadette Manuelito. The fine descriptions of Navajo Country's landscape are here too, though they are not quite as eloquent as in some earlier books. What is missing is a clever mystery that challenges the reader to sleuth alongside Leaphorn and Chee, with unexpected twists and turns. Many readers will figure out what happened to the missing woman long before the final chapter. They may regret the lack of moral weight in the outcome.

Rating:
Summary: Hillerman Mines Gold
Review: The Wailing Wind is a very good continuation of the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee/Bernie Manuelito series within the now 15 volume Navajo mystery series by Tony Hillerman. In The Wailing Wind, a current murder case being investigated by Bernie Manuelito, Jim Chee, and the FBI becomes entangled with a loose end left over from an allegedly solved case from Joe Leaphorn's past. As we've come to expect from a good Hillerman novel, the characters have to navigate through the complicated cultural landscape and the rugged physical landscape found in the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States. I thoroughly enjoyed the unraveling of the mysteries in The Wailing Wind. To those folks who wished this novel [and The First Eagle] were more Navajo, I challenge you to take a trip into the Four Corners region and then reread the book. As always, Hillerman has accurately portrayed the region and its people as they are. A trip to the southwest would reveal this. To all readers, if you can't take a trip to the southwest in person, then take the trip from the comfort of your living room with Tony Hillerman's The Wailing Wind.

Rating:
Summary: Tony at his best
Review: I could not put this book down. If I did my husband would grab it and then I would have to wait for him to put it down. When we finished it, we sent it to our son-in-law and he felt the same way. Tony Hillerman makes the Navajo culture and the Navajo Nation come alive. I teach on the Navajo Reservation and he is well read there especially among the high school students.

Rating:
Summary: Too Easy
Review: I love Tony Hillerman's books, but in this one, the mystery was just too easily solved. I like it when I can't figure out "whodunit" half-way through the book! But I do like that Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn are s-l-o-w-l-y moving toward closer relationships with the women in their lives. I really want Jim Chee to be happily married, and to a woman who accepts the Navajo Way.

Rating:
Summary: I miss the Navajo-inspired stories
Review:

I'm weighing in against the tide here. I've been a Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee fan since the beginning, but this story left me a little flat.

What made me such a Hillerman fan were the rich stories of a culture walking a very precarious tightrope between past and present. This story about a swindle-gone-bad between two white men who happened to be interested in some Indian land didn't have the same feel to it as other Hillerman classics like SACRED CLOWNS or COYOTE WAITS.

In the past, Hillerman taught his readers important lessons about Indian culture. This book just rehashes old territory, and it's not even a very good trip.

Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee and Officer Bernadette Manuelito (under utilized until now) deserve better than this.

Rating:
Summary: Toward Perfection
Review: I am awed by Tony Hillerman's artistic capacity and integrity. It is always with a mixed sense of contentment and regret that I close the final page of each book. Never was this more the case than with his most recent effort, The Wailing Wind. Increasingly, throughout every installment of his Navajo Tribal police mystery series, I have had the sense of something powerful and dynamic, something as pure as the high desert air, moving amongst his uniquely authentic characters. Only during this last reading did the presence become so strong that I was easily able to identify it. An unseen agent has been hard but quietly at work through all of Hillerman's books. For me it stepped from the shadows in The Wailing Wind. It is the presence of a relentless, uncompromising search for perfection. Using words with so much skill that less of them are needed rather than more, Tony Hillerman leads the way among modern writers up the steep granite slopes toward the rarified atmosphere where giants live. Read this book and experience the fruit of a lifetime quest toward artistic perfection.

Rating:
Summary: Worth the wait?--Officer Bernie comes into her own.
Review: It's been a while since Hillerman penned a new Leaphorn & Chee novel, and although this was a quick read, I was impressed that Hillerman could go back to the well with his two recurring characters and come up with a surprisingly fresh and original story blending Native American legends and homicide.

You'd think that after all these novels in Hillerman's career that we'd truly know his characters Leaphorn and Chee intimately, however, but he does an exceptional job in developing and fleshing them out further. While we are constantly reminded by Leaphorn's dead wife and Chee's failed relationships, both take a turn yet again in this novel and begin new chapters in their lives. It's great, because the reader doesn't get tired of the same people, they grow as we grow and we genuinely get interested in their fictional lives as we would are own, even if they have nothing to do with the plot.

In Wailing Wind, we finally see the emergence of deputy Bernie M., a recurring character who was always regulated to a barely supporting cast member. I think Hillerman was grooming this novel just for her, as much of the plot revolves around Bernie discovering a dead body on the side of the hi-way on a routine patrol. Then as the novel ensues, the reader begins a journey alongside Bernie....the way she thinks, the way she takes her job, her feelings toward Chee, etc. There are some passages that we witness in which Bernie does her own detective work and speaks to her family clan members about happiness and love. I think you'll be impressed with her development.

The story itself revolves around the discovery of Bernie's dead body, some placer gold, legendary area gold mines, a missing woman 20 years back, and the local story of the 'Wailing Woman' heard on the eve of Halloween by a group of teens near the defunct army base all those years ago.

It is up to Chee, Leaphorn, and Bernie to discover and link what these very different cases have in common after all these years. What is evident is that retired Leaphorn is still the main detective and does much of the discovery on his own while dealing with the FBI, an old Indian, and Wiley Denton (Denton was once in jail for killing a man over a deal gone bad involving a gold mine, and has since lost his lovely wife). Denton wants to hire Leaphorn to find his missing bride, but it seems Denton has many secrets involving his past and goldmines.

The ending has a brilliant setup, and by the time you get to the climax, everything comes together, and though you may feel slightly cheated (as you can pretty much guess the outcome), it is riveting to read. I knew what I was about to ingest, but loved it anyway, as it fed into the whole mystery of the 'Wailing Woman', and what exactly happened to her.