The First Eagle
I took Tony Hillerman's The First Eagle with me on my recent trip. It was his 15th novel.
Okay, let's get the grimace count out of the way first. Eight. Pages 2, 3, 7, 36, 100, 159, 247 and 257 of my paperback edition. The man probably would have lived another six or seven years if he'd dropped the habit, but what can you say?
Janet Pete is back in town for this one, complicating Jim Chee's life. Bernadette Manuelito transferred to Tuba City to get away from Chee, and now he's been moved there too, further complicating his life. Oh, and of course somebody has hired Joe Leaphorn to look into a matter that brings him right into the middle of a case that Chee is working on, a capital case, which, of course, complicates Jim Chee's life.
Hillerman has two cases in this book, or really three. We have someone dying of the plague in the opening scene. We have a cop getting brained in the second scene, and we learn of a missing scientist in a third. The threads all interconnect at Yells Back Butte.
This isn't the best entry in the series, but it reliably provides what I look for in Hillerman's books. I still have five more that I haven't read, and then I'll probably be re-reading them, eventually. He did good work.
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