The Sinister Pig

Rating:
Summary: Different, But Not ¿Boaring¿
Review: For the dedicated Hillerman reader, this latest may be disappointing. We have become accustomed to excellent mysteries which are also anthropology lessons. In almost if not every story of Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Tony Hillerman has presented his readers with lessons about many facets of the southwestern Native American culture, the problems this culture faces. This novel is more a straight thriller, without significant overtones of cultural stress and adaptation. The basic plot line does have a Native American connection. It seems that the Department of the Interior is responsible for a trust fund for Native Americans. The trust is where royalties and other payments for oil, gas, timber, and other sales from reservation lands are deposited so that the money can be used for the benefit of the tribes. It also seems that tens of billions of dollars which should be in the trust are not, and there doesn't seem to be any explanation. A senator hires a retiring CIA specialist in pipelines to investigate what is happening in the "four-corners" territory, especially as it related to activities of a billionaire recluse who may be dabbling in hard drugs as well as petroleum. The implication is that the billionaire is diverting gas and oil from the pipeline and avoiding paying royalties-or anything else. The covert investigator is found murdered on the reservation and Jim Chee is the investigating officer. But the FBI claims jurisdiction, transfers case management to Washington, and then stonewalls. Chee wonders why the apparent cover-up and keeps on digging. Enough waves are made that DC people involved in investigating the trust fund situation wonder if there is a connection and ask Joe Leaphorn, now retired, to look into the case. What follows is a very good thriller, with unlikely "heroes" and bad guys getting their just desserts. The implications of Washington insider conspiracies are raised but never resolved; yet, while not quite up to Hillerman's stories which do have stronger cultural lessons, this is a very good book. PS: the sinister pig is not Native American but pipeline related. Read the book to find out what the title reference is about.

Rating:
Summary: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice ...
Review: OK, I thought, "The Wailing Wind" was an aberration, a hiccup in the career of a very good author. But two points define a line, and "The Sinister Pig" plots Mr. Hillerman's career straight down. In the corporate world you sometimes see a luminary from an earlier era who is "RIP" -- retired in place -- just going through the motions, living on past glories and collecting the big bucks for his reputation, not his current work. Sadly, this describes Tony Hillerman, who has decided to stir around a few ashes, thow in a highly predictable conclusion, and call it a novel. I bet he's laughing at his readers all the way to the bank.

As for the book itself, reviewers occasionally describe a film as "OK for a 10-minute sketch on SNL, but not a 90-minute feature." That's Sinister Pig for you: interesting premise but almost no plot or character development (call central casting for all the stereotypes), no suspense (you know from the start who's really a bad guy and who's really not), and the shallowest of literary style (like Wailing Wind, everyone is constantly "grinning" at everyone else). The initial plot device, investigating diversion of Indian royalty payments, is both interesting and topical -- it's really happening -- but couldn't lead to a facile wrap-up in a mere 224 pages, so Mr. Hillerman switches to just another standard contraband tale. Rest assured, the good guys prosper, the bad guys pay, and the bad guys who are really good guys ... well, what do you expect?

I did like the little polemics on stealing of Indian royalties, the vested interest of both narcos and narcs in keeping the "War on Drugs" going full steam, and the pervasiveness of corruption in high office, but they weren't enough to salvage an otherwise trivial work.

If Mr. Hillerman hasn't retired completely, I'll wait until his next book is available in the public domain before reading it.

Rating:
Summary: Satisfying
Review: (I almost want to write a review of some of the early reviewers, whiney, thoughtless and ill-spirited. Instead see billhobbs, Peggy Vincent, Bruce Trinque, Don Mitchell and Bookreporter.com, among a few other good and thoughtful reviews here.)

I found this book satisfying. I especially liked Hillerman's brave exposing of how government employees might be involved in a circular, mutually beneficial way with drug smugglers. As well, his clear view of the sad results of maintaining marijuana as illegal, all the wasted money and time and lives that go into this senseless fight (alcohol, legal, is hardly better than the effects of marijuana and more often leads to deaths of others; both used to excess would be bad for one's health, as would sugar and fat); especially for cancer patients and others in pain marijuana would be beneficial if allowed to be so.
It was good to experience again (I wait with bated breath for each Hillerman novel) the long long drives on hot, dry roads through the Southwest, hills in view, barely anything else. I remember those drives with my parents as a child when we took trips across country for my father's beginning business. It is like nothing else.

Rating:
Summary: Was this really written by Hillerman?
Review: The reading of this book became a real chore....I found myself reading just to be reading, but not really enjoying. The beginning of the book was confusing, boring and not very well written. The pace did seem to pick up when there was more of Chee/Leaphorn. The last 9-10 chapters, which were good, sort of balanced out the first 17-18 which were mediocre, hence the 3 star rating instead of 1 star. And, while I'm crabbing, I want to address the fairly recent practice of putting out 200 page books for $.... I'm beginning to read some of the lesser known authors with "hefty" books so that I feel that I am getting my "money's worth".

Rating:
Summary: What a disappointment!
Review: I am a devoted Hillerman fan and have read (and sometimes re-read) all of his books. I anxiously awaited publication of Sinister Pig to feed my Hillerman Jones.

I don't know who wrote this book, but it wasn't Hillerman. It was poorly plotted, with weak character definition and bad dialog.

What's a fan to do?

Rating:
Summary: boring disappointment
Review: I agree with many other of the negative reviews, I found Sinister Pig to be a boring disappointment. The Jim Chee character has always had romance problems and I always thought they were poorly written about; however, I could speed read through and ignore those portions and still greatly enjoy the book because of its strengths, the various tribal cultural, religious and mythological connections to a crime mystery, and descriptions of the Four Corners high desert landscape. Those strong aspects were missing from this book. If he must include romantic relationships in his books, Mr. Hillerman should join up with a successful romance novelist. If you're a Hillerman fan, skip this book.

Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: This is not really a Chee/Leaphorn novel. It does not take place on the Navajo Reservation, neither Chee nor Leaphorn is really involved in the crime, and the crime really has nothing to do with Navajo culture in any way. In fact, the effort to involve them comes off as contrived.

While Bernie is more of a central character, she is a weak central character. All we find out about her is that she is sad and misses Jim Chee. We don't even get to see her as a very professional cop.

The most interesting character is actually Budge (a hatchet man for a cartoonish Very Bad Rich Guy). If only the novel had been written about him, from his viewpoint, it could have been great. As it was, it was just an OK but forgettable standard cop/mystery story.

It couldn't even decide if it was going to be a story about exploitation of Indian resources or about smuggling drugs. And while I support legalization of most drugs, the discussion of that in the book was heavyhanded and simplistic.

It really seemed as though Hillerman had a bunch of topics and series plot developments on a checklist, but was searching for a real novel to slip them into. Sadly, he came up with this threadbare framework instead.

The stylistic skill was as good as ever (thus the three stars), but you know what they say about putting lipstick on a pig....

Rating:
Summary: Easily Hillerman's worst -- very disappointing
Review: I am a huge Tony Hillerman fan -- I've read each of his novels multiple times and have enjoyed all of them. My favorites are Dance Hall of the Dead and Skinwalkers.

The Sinister Pig, simply put, is an awful book, and is not even close to the level Hillerman has set for himself. Much of the action takes place on airplanes and in limousines, and next to nothing occurs anywhere close to the Navajo reservation. Hillerman tries to introduce the flavor of the New Mexico/Mexico border region, but his descriptions do not even come close to the standard he set for the Four Corners area. Had I not been to this area many times myself (I grew up in Arizona) I wouldn't be able to distinguish the border region from Kentucky. Finally, the subtlety and grace of earlier Hillerman character interaction -- Leaphorn and Emma, Chee and Mary Landon, and so on -- has been blown away by a sudden urge by Hillerman to make everything explicit. Yes, Tony, we know Chee loves Bernie and Bernie loves Chee -- why do you have to pound it in to us in every single scene?

This book was, simply put, painful to read, and I wouldn't have finished it at all were I not such a big Hillerman fan. If you are new to Hillerman, please please please do not begin with this poor work. And if you haven't read every Hillerman novel, probably multiple times, my advice is to put this one aside and go back to those books you haven't read, or haven't read in a while. I really wonder, seriously, if Hillerman farmed this out to some ghost writer -- it really has the feel of some poor shmuck trying to mimic Hillerman's characters....... it's sad, because I had really hoped that Tony had one or two good novels still left in him, but if The Sinister Pig is any indication, he doesn't. Very, very sad.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing Pig
Review: To be fair, I must state up-front that I'm not unbiased--I like most of Tony Hillerman's books a lot. During the late sixties and early seventies I spent a part of each year visiting some of the Navajo Reservation's more remote places, meeting people and learning. Hillerman's books typically convey the setting and its people lovingly, yet genuinely, without cloying sentimentality.

In his latest book, however, Hillerman badly misfires. If I didn't know his primary characters from previous novels I would not care about them after reading The Sinister Pig. Leaphorn, Chee, and the emerging Bernadette Manuelito are merely cardboard cutouts in his latest book; the author plainly depends (more than usual) on a continuing readership to carry the breadth of character forward. Although the devoted reader can flesh out the primary characters from memory, he/she gets little help with the evil villain and his minions. One gets only the thinnest of characterizations, explanations, and interconnections--even though a potential wealth of story lurks beneath the premise.

Delivering Leaphorn and Chee into drug-smuggling intrigue on the Mexican border strains credulity, the mechanism drawing them there barely plausible. One wonders if Hillerman may have simply dashed this book onto paper in order to bridge an interlude instructing the faithful as to the continuing nature of the Chee-Manuelito relationship. It is as if Hillerman had neglected fulfilling a contract to write a book a year for Harper-Collins until the last month--tossing this off to meet a deadline.

Thinness of plot extends to thinness of the book generally--it would barely make 200 pages if the publisher had not left the last page of many chapters blank, while including them in the page count.

One dearly hopes that Mr. Hillerman returns to the reservation, becoming so engrossed in his next story that the smell of cedar smoke is not lost amidst corporate jets and big-city chaos.

Rating:
Summary: Shallow
Review: It almost seems as if Hillerman is trying rush the Leaphorn/Chee serial to a happy ending for his readers so he can quit writing them. In true Hillerman form, the plot had great potential rooted in current events, but came up shallow. For me it was reminiscent of some of Hillerman's work in the 80s when he seemed obsessed with the professional killer who was in turn obsessed with his parents (which isn't necessarily bad, it worked very well in "People of Darkness"). There are some twists and surprises, but not enough to save it. Even a bad Hillerman Leaphorn/Chee story is a good read for me, but I was spoiled by "Sacred Clowns" and "Hunting Badger"!!