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I have been a follower of the Hillerman's Leaphorn/Chee/Manuelito series since it all began with father Tony's THE BLESSING WAY. Throughout the series, which adds up to 27 books now, there have been ups and downs in quality, but the ongoing characters that readers have come to know and love, as well as the Southwest setting and Navajo culture depicted in most of the books, has kept me entranced and ready for the next one even as the writing quality occasionally dipped. With the most recent Anne Hillerman novel in the series, LOST BIRDS, this remains true despite what may be the low point as far as quality is concerned. If I didn't know better, and if the characters had different names, I would not have pegged this as a Hillerman book at all.
As is the case with all of the books in the series since daughter Anne took over the writing, Bernie Manuelito is the central character of the book, with both her personal and professional lives playing important roles in the plot. Having been trained in bomb site investigation, she is called away from her position as a police officer in the Navajo Nation to be the first officer on the ground after a Navajo school building explodes. For much of the book, there is confusion about whether the explosion was intentional or accidental, and this is not fully resolved until the very end of the book as it forms the main mystery in the plot. There are side plots regarding the missing birth family of a (possibly) Navajo woman, Bernie's sister's and mother's issues, a missing woman, Leaphorn's partner's troubles with her son, and a Navajo man with a gambling problem. Although these side plots are loosely tied to the primary school explosion plot in various ways, the connections seem clunky and disjointed. The adoption search is basically a disconnected plot that allows Hillerman to impart some information about conditions in the Navajo Nation in the 1970s, and it feels like a plot line that was just glued onto the main thread of the book rather than integral in any way.
Much of the book has this fragmented focus, along with an over-reliance upon the reader's previous knowledge of the characters. If a reader tried to enter the series at this point, they would find it very difficult to connect with the characters who often act in odd ways that further development might have turned into traits. As it stands, the reader is left to make sense of each player on the basis of behavior or actions in a book that is neither plot-driven nor character-driven. It felt as if this might have been a first draft that was rushed to publication without proper development or editing. That said, learning more about the history of the Navajo culture as well as the setting in which it resides is always interesting. And, in the past, Hillerman has shown herself to be capable of much better than this book. I remain hopeful that the series continuation will next bring us greater depth in a more focused, developed book number 28 of the series.
§ Sharon Mensing, retired educational leader, lives, reads, and enjoys the outdoors in Arizona.
Reviewed by Sharon Mensing, April 2024
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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