Tight weave
Familiar characters, Navajo traditions, modern concerns come together in latest Hillerman novel
The literary equivalent of a Navajo blanket, Santa Fe mystery writer Anne Hillerman’s novel “Song of the Lion” deftly and methodically weaves together storytelling with Navajo lore, customs, descriptions of hardscrabble living and a web of entwined family and clan relationships.
Several Bilagáanas — Navajo for Anglos — are in the warp and woof of the story.
All of those elements either flavor or are keys to unraveling the mystery and to understanding who’s who and whodunit.
Hillerman’s third and latest book, as with her first two novels (“Spider Woman’s Daughter” and “Rock With Wings”), is subtitled “A Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito Novel.”
Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito were characters created by her famous mystery-writing-father, the late Tony Hillerman.
Daughter Anne has made dominant the female viewpoint in her series. Manuelito, a female Navajo cop and Chee’s wife, is the protagonist.
The basic story of “Song of the Lion” is a controversial, long-brewing tourist development planned for an area of the Grand Canyon at the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers. The development would be on the Navajo rez, but it is land other Indian tribes hold sacred.
The story opens with an explosion of an unoccupied BMW — a bomb? It’s parked outside a basketball game in Shiprock. The car owner, Aza Palmer, a former Shiprock resident, practices law in Phoenix.
In a few days, he will be mediating a public discussion in Tuba City on the planned development. The story edges toward a murder mystery after a young Navajo man, hurt in the explosion, later dies of his injuries.
The reader begins to think that the explosion and the death of the man may be linked to Palmer’s mediation of the hot-button development plan.
Off-duty at the basketball game, Manuelito quickly finds herself drawn into the investigation of the incident.
Meanwhile, Chee, also a Navajo cop, is assigned as Palmer’s bodyguard to protect him from possible attacks.
Leaphorn, a respected retired Navajo policemen, still contributes.
Conversations with Manuelito trigger questions about information stored in archived police files and in his memory bank.
The book’s title refers to the mountain lion. In Navajo lore, Hillerman writes in the novel, the animal represents protection and healing.
Early in the book, a Navajo police dispatcher-friend of Manuelito’s gives her a small rock Manuelito believes is shaped like “the náshdóítsoh, the mountain lion.”
As if foretelling a need to protect, a real mountain lion makes several shadowy appearances as the tension builds.
In one passage, Manuelito is walking alone on a trail near a canyon overlook. “Then, out of the edge of her vision she saw something move. Something tan and large. She tried to remember what, if anything, she’d read about the relationship between náshdóítsoh, a guardian of the mountains, and people trespassing in lion habitat.”