The Wailing Wind.

by Tony Hillerman

Even the title The Wailing Wind--of Tony Hillerman's best-selling, fifteenth mystery featuring the crime-solving Navajos Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee--contains the puzzle: what, where, when, who, and so what? But aren't we lawyers known for solving puzzles?

The narrative starts with Officer Bernadette Manuelito discovering a dead body in a pickup truck blocking the path "up the bottom of the dry wash." What happened? In seeking Hillerman's clues, we compete with the Navajo protagonists to solve the homicide.

They, however, hold the advantage until we rediscover the importance of setting: the contemporary Navajo Indian Reservation in the corners of Arizona and New Mexico. The detailed maps (within both front and back covers) contain clues to both solution and recognition of a society's influences on legal concepts. Leaphorn and Chee know the geographical site of the seeds on the dead man's shoes, the Spanish legends of the lost gold mine (The Golden Calf), and the Indian ways (diversity of both culture and perception). For example, the reluctance to be a witness comes from the Navajos' belief that incarceration is useless. Instead, they diagnose the cause and provide the curing ceremony "to bring back health and harmony." The Navajos (without the written language to preserve their culture) also respect the spoken word so much they never interrupt a speaker. Similarly, in asking questions, the Navajo way is respected: Rituals exist in human relationships. Regard for time differs from our "court-house rush."

Those who have followed Hillerman's "way" through two-dozen or-more books find the most clues in this latest novel in the characterization of Leaphorn, now mentor to the younger Chee. Both become experts in understanding the relationship of the past and the present and of using this understanding to master the present. Hillerman (tonyhillermanbooks.com) shares the roots of both characters: When a reporter, he met a Texas sheriff whom he developed into Leaphorn. "He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers--my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn't." Later, Hillerman needed the character Chee, "a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheever's 'Days of Old' modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in a universe of consumerism."

One clue offers false hope: The female officer Bernadette discovers the homicide and seeks its solution. Finally, an equal female officer? Hillerman, however, retains his stereotype of the beautiful but lesscompetent female officer with a romantic attraction to Chee. In all fairness, however, the author has Chee retell a sexist Zuni legend: Two hunters rescued a dragonfly that granted each one wish. "One wished to be the smartest man in the world. The dragonfly said, `So you shall be.' But the second hunter wanted to be smarter than the smartest man in the world.... So the dragonfly converted the second hunter into a woman."

Although Hillerman creates credible characters and masters regionalism, above all he knows how to tell a story. It's worth a read--if only to find the clues to both homicides and title, The Wailing Wind.

The Wailing Wind sells for $25.95, hard copy, 232 pp.

C. D. Rogers is a member of The Florida Bar.