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Book Review of The Wailing Wind (Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Bk 15)

The Wailing Wind (Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Bk 15)
perryfran avatar reviewed on + 1182 more book reviews


Another very good entry in the Leaphorn and Chee series by Hillerman. I have only read a few of these but I really enjoy the series and started reading them after watching and enjoying the TV series Dark Winds on AMC. This is the fifteenth book in the series and unfortunately I have been reading these very much out of sequence. However, the stories can definitely be read without knowing the backstories of all the characters.

In this one Leaphorn is retired, Chee is a sergeant with the Navaho Tribal Police and Bernadette Manuelito is an officer on the force. Bernie is out on patrol when she gets a call to investigate an abandoned vehicle. Turns out the vehicle contains a dead man who appears to have died naturally. However, he was actually shot and had been moved with no apparent visible blood resulting in Bernie being dinged for mishandling the scene. The dead man did have the phone number of a rich ex-con in his pocket and nearby was an old Prince Albert tobacco tin containing some tracer gold. The ex-con was a wealthy oil-lease magnate named Wiley Denton who confessed to shooting a con man named Marvin McKay dead two years previously. McKay was trying to get into a partnership with Denton to find the lost Golden Calf goldmine and as part of the deal receive $50k from Denton. Denton got a light sentence and served his time for manslaughter. This had case always bothered Leaphorn who wondered what became of Denton's beautiful young wife Linda, who vanished the day of the killing. So is this second murder related to the Denton case? The murdered man, Thomas Doherty, also had some evidence in his truck related to the Golden Calf goldmine. So can Leaphorn, Chee, and Bernie sort out what really happened and why?

As usual, I enjoyed this one very much. Hillerman's knowledge of the Navaho adds so much to the story and his descriptions of desert southwest are really special. I'll be looking forward to reading more in this series.