Western Mysteries
The trans-Mississippi West seems a great stage for mysteries. The urban East has its turf, especially New York City (and Spenser’s Boston, I hasten to add), and the West Coast has its mean streets, especially in Los Angeles. Florida and New Orleans can make good claims. But the big West, where scale is almost unimaginable compared to the size of a bullet, is an interesting and evocative place for the unknown and the human agent to make it known.
If you wanted to track a lineage for Western Mysteries, you could go back to Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837) or Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson (1894) or others soon to follow by Zane Grey and the explosion of “westerns” in the early 20th Century. For this page, however, in its launch, we will stick the most popular writers for Whistlestop in this category. Check back for more thought and more additions.
The Sinister Pig: A Leaphorn and Chee Novel
The Sinister Pig: A Leaphorn and Chee Novel
Hot on the heels of his huge bestseller, The Wailing Wind, Tony Hillerman brings back Chee and Leaphorn in a puzzling new mystery
The body of a well-dressed fellow, all identification missing, is found hidden under the brush on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation. The local FBI takes over from the Navajo Police Sergeant Jim Chee, and quickly has the case snatched all the way to Washington. Washington proves uncooperative and the case is deadended. When Joe Leaphorn, the “legendary lieutenant” of Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police discovers that Washington officials hid the body’s identity, lines surprisingly connect to the case he’s working on at exotic game ranch. A photograph she sends him tells Chee she is facing a danger he doesn’t understand.
Hillerman produces a galaxy of unusual characters in this compelling novel that is sure to confound readers until the very last page.