The Way of the Bear by Anne Hillerman

 

I will admit up front to being a devoted fan of Tony Hillerman’s Navaho detective mysteries for a long time. His daughter, Anne Hillerman, has carried on his series and I remain a fan. The Way of the Bear is her eighth book in the continuation and she now concentrates more on the adventures of Bernadette Manuelito and her husband Jim Chee. Joe Leaphorn, the original chief detective, is now retired but nearby for consultation if needed. He may even come back into more prominence again if a bit of a hint at the end of this book is a truthful tease.

 

Ms. Hillerman brings a significant departure from her father’s work in the sense that she brings the concerns of women, both personally and professionally into the spotlight. In The Way of the Bear,  Bernie Manuelito and her husband are on a little break in Page, UT.  Jim Chee, her policeman husband, has been asked to visit a reclusive paleontologist to confirm his financial interest in donating money to the Navaho police. Bernie has tagged along, but is nursing a present disappointment in her failure to achieve promotion to detective and a deeper grief that is only hinted at early in the book.

 

While Chee prepares to meet the paleontologist, Bernie travels to the newly created Bears Ear National Monument and the Valley of the Gods to think about her future. Both Navaho detectives quickly run into violence. Bernie is shot at in the desert and Chee learns of one death on a local highway and finds another on the doorstep of the man he was to visit.

 

All of the usual twists and turn enliven this book, including the required final revealing of the main villains. You may find Ms. Hillerman’s plot reliance on cell phone calls in the quirky service area of the desert a bit too flagrant and the foreshadowing of nasty weather as a tension raising device a bit too obvious, but her delightful characters keep you turning the pages.

 

Finally, Hillerman’s veneration of the land itself as combined with the history and culture of the Navaho nation is fascinating and emotionally compelling. She manages to integrate the sciences of archaeology, geology, and paleontology into the plot without making it seem too wonky. She then manages to merge the science beautifully into a personal story of family and marriage that is always an undercurrent even while the detectives are facing danger in the world of stolen artifacts, environmental greed, and graverobbing. There is even a little skull named Mary that might be as important as the Leaky family’s Lucy in promoting a true concern for our planet and the well-being of all of the many species that populate it.  

 

I give it a 4.5 out of 5

 

P.S. The story of the creation of Bears Ears National Monument is intriguing all on its own. A google search will give you lots of material including insight into the political fight that has surrounded it. Check this URL out for a brief pictorial review.  http://bearsears.patagonia.com/

 

The Light Over London --Book review

 

The Light Over London  by Julia Kelly  

Are you into a bit of romance combined with a bit of history? If you are, Julia Kelly’s 2019 entry titled The Light Over London might be up your alley. It is a part of an entertaining and instructive genre that has recently produced a number of novels about women’s roles in the second world war. Jacqueline Winspear has dealt with female pilots, for instance and others have dealt with women code breakers at Bletchley Park and women’s service in intelligence. Some of the most courageous even parachuted into France to work with the resistance. 

Kelly has hitched her star to this  market by writing about the “ack ack” women who became part of anti-aircraft gun crews in London and other English cities. If you have not heard of these young volunteer patriots, you will get a full measure of enjoyment from the history alone.  And if you like some romance you can settle comfortably into the love affairs of two women from two different times and backgrounds.

Louise Keene, a sheltered young village girl, is swept off her feet by Paul, a dashing young spitfire pilot in the WW II Brit Air Force. To do her part in the war effort, she joins the women’s auxiliary of the British Army and her training reveals an expertise in maths that earns her an assignment to an anti-aircraft gun crew. At the same time she also begins a diary that records her feelings, her letters, and her beloved Paul’s responses.

Sixty years later, Cara Hargraves, a recently divorced woman working for an antique business, finds a tin box that contains old memorabilia and Louise Keene’s unfinished WW II diary. Cara is fascinated by the find and embarks on a search to learn more about the diarist and the described love affair. Conveniently, Cara also has a single male neighbor who offers to help in the search. 

From here on the book alternates chapters between Cara’s investigation in the present and Louise’s experiences from the past. The fairly traditional gimmick to integrate  the two stories seemed a bit arbitrary to me and the sexual sizzle remained resolutely  within the “cosy” genre guidelines.  But, overall, the material on the training and lives of the "gunner" girls was engaging and historically informative. I had never heard of these women. They were prohibited from engaging in combat, but they could do everything to aim and prepare the guns to fire except pull the actual trigger. It is not at all surprising to learn that a fair number of them were killed or injured while serving their country.      

 This is not a great book by any stretch of the imagination, but it retains enough bang for your proverbial buck to give it a try.  I give it a 3.5 out of 5 

 

 

 

 

 

A LINE TO KILL by Anthony Horowitz

 

A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz is a 2021 continuation of the Horowitz-Hawthorne series of mysteries. I  had recently enjoyed the London theatre setting in his The Twist of A Knife and had seen of his televised contributions such as The Magpie Murders. Once again Horowitz is the real author and also appears in the book as the writer who is following ex-detective Daniel Horowitz around while he solves more cases.

 

In this outing the pair is invited to attend a literary festival to promote their next to be published novel. The event is to take place on the quaint little English channel island of Alderney. It is an interesting and exotic location that still bears the scars of being taken over by the Germans during WWII and I was a bit disappointed that more about this history might was not incorporated.    

 

Shortly after the pair arrive, the rich resident who has bankrolled the festival is murdered. He has also been at the center of an ongoing fight to put a new electrical line from France that will result in environmental and historical destruction in exchange for lower rates. This leaves motives a-plenty for island residents to consider murder and it is complicated by previously unknown connections to the victim from among the invited literary guests.

 

Alderney is such a peaceful place that there is no upper-level constabulary on the island to handle murder, so a pair of investigators must be dispatched from Guernsey to handle the case. Even though Hawthorne is no longer with Scotland Yard, the DI sent over gives semi-official carte blanche to him to work the case and work it he does.

 

With befuddled writer and hanger-on Horowitz doing little other than wondering how he might write a book about the case, I kept bogging down in the narrative. It takes a lot of pages to set up the opening scenes and even the second murder of the first victim’s wife isn't much help. The narrative begins to pick up a bit as w head for the conclusion, but the final twists are so complex that it takes a whole series of chapters to tie things up. Coincidences are a part of fiction as well as real life, but there are just too many in this one for me to swallow. I give it a 2 out of 5 and in a publishing world inundated with crime fiction, Horowitz’s output won't be on my "have-to-read pile" any longer.