Lust, greed and and revenge. Got your attention?
The Blessing Way
by Tony HIllerman
Tony Hillerman books stand out from your average everyday who-dun-it murder mysteries in two very important ways. First, you are captured by Hillerman’s writing. No fancy words here, but somehow, his careful arrangement and presentation of the written word, unfolds the American Southwest in your head with sight, smells and story.
The reader moves through the high desert landscape through the eyes of the people who live in it. Seeing the stark beauty through the eyes of its inhabitants and visitors.
Sometimes by juxtapositioning the city life and reasoning against the emptiness and quiet of the reservation.
Second, any reader of mysteries knows the basic three motives by heart: lust, greed and and revenge. Hillerman shifts and twists the criminal’s reasoning specific to the environment and the cultures of the Navajos, Pueblo Indians and European man.
Gutsy for a white man to write about native peoples, but Hillerman does it with deep understanding of the first peoples and universal human nature alike.
In the Blessing Way, the first in the Navajo Police Mysteries we follow not only Leaphorn, but anthropologist Bergen as they unravel the disturbing stories of Navajo witchcraft surrounding a lost body.
