Rick McBee's Writings

Shapeshifter by Tony Hillerman  (Three Stars)

This is a slow moving, but well written tale from the Navajo Reservation once again immersed in Hillerman’s own detail oriented world of Officer (now-retired)Lt.  Leaphorn and his protégé and sometimes competitor Sgt. Chee.

In almost laconic fashion the author lays out his plot of the shape-shifting ex-CIA monster who has a bone to pick with three accomplices who are just getting out of prison, having served time for the CIA man’s plot. Perhaps they will rat on him, perhaps they will recognize him for what he is, a changeling who has once again assumed a new identity in order to work his criminal wiles  on the unsuspecting Navajo population to do them out of an antique Shape-shifter rug. 

With a bottle of special-forces maraschino cherries laced with quick acting cyanide or other chemical our villain blithely tops off his Vietnamese cook’s cake decorations for those who seem to be getting too close to the truth.  Leaphorn narrowly escapes in his own slow moving bumbling but clever ways as he innocently follows a lead to our man in an investigation of stolen buckets of Pinion Pine sap from granny’s house.  Fortunately he doesn’t like fruitcake!>)

Chee stumbles through a nearly squelched engagement to help Leaphorn and the cook hunt down the monster in the hills bordering N. Mexico and Arizona. The ending although justified, shows how it’s probably best that old Leaphorn has decided to retire.  Tampering with and concealing evidence anyone? Hmm, alls well that ends well unless they find the hidden body. Of course for Hillerman that’s always food for one more novel.  Not as much of the Navajo lore in this one as I like.

Coyote Waits  by Tony Hillerman  (Four Stars)

Hillerman does this one up pretty well in a long winded tribute to the cunning, evil and almost man-like attributes of Coyote who, “ always waits outside and is always hungry.”

The tale telling is well scripted in the part where old Pinto tells his tales of the Witches’ lair outside of the Ship Rock section of the reservation.  The tale pulls together well, showing how Coyote lays for even the most innocent of us through taking our own avarices to the extreme whether these be for drink, greed, money, power or even Sgt.Chee’s  embarrassment at being found out to have been negligent in assisting his partner.

The  convolutions of the tale twist like the ropey Pahoihoi lava cave in the outcropping where Butch Cassidy and his partners finally meet their end at the hands of pursuing Indians of the past century. Treasure awaits but so do the pitfalls of a rattlesnake infested witches’ caldron of lies and counter lies. Once again a has been CIA agent falls prey to his own cleverness to not tell the truth to the inquiring perceptive thoughts of Sgt. Chee. 

Love again creeps into the tale with the renewal of an old flame between Chee and the girl who went off to college and the simmering underground affair that seems to be working between Leaphorn and one of the professors who is helping with the case.  Will Leaphorn take the long awaited trip to China with his new found love?  What is the mysterious white painter on the cliffs trying to achieve with his lovelorn vandalism?

The section on familial and clan relationships is very interesting. It reminds one of the problems the ancients in the Bible got themselves into trying to marry or not marry between different clans. In oral tradition histories one can never be too sure, so best to marry from across the reservation with a clan that you aren’t related with at all, of course that marriage messes those relationships up for the offspring. There can only be so many permutations of this before it comes back around. Hopefully Hillerman will elucidate us on how many generations need to pass before your kids can marry back into the clan you or your wife is from.

The ending was a bit sloppy on corpses. Really, Tony the good Prof. should have smelled pretty high by the time he is found.  Don’t want to be  a spoiler here. So enuf is enuf.