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 Wailing Wind: A Leaphorn and Chee Novel
The Wailing Wind: A Leaphorn and Chee Novel
Legendary detectives Leaphorn and Chee are pulled into mysteries old and new in this haunting tale of obsessive greed, lost love, and murder from the “national literary and cultural sensation” (Los Angeles Times)—New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman.
Officer Bernadette Manuelito finds the dead man slumped over in the cab of a pickup, with a rich ex-con's phone number in his pocket . . . and a tobacco tin filled with placer gold. She figures he’s just another drunk—an assumption that gets her in trouble for mishandling a crime scene and brings down the wrath of the FBI on her supervisor, Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police.
For Chee’s mentor, former Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, the death eerily echoes a long dormant cold case. Years earlier, Leaphorn followed the trail of a beautiful, young, and missing wife to a dead end, and the failure to close that investigation has haunted him ever since. This new case could lead to the truth, and the legendary lawman comes out of retirement, determined to solve it.
But ghosts never sleep in these high, lonely Southwestern hills. For Bernie, Leaphorn, and Chee, the twisted threads of craven murders past and current may finally be coming together, as the desert gives up its secrets . . . secrets heard in the wailing wind.