The Fallen Man
by Tony Hillerman
  

HarperCollins, New York; 1996

Plot elements range from stolen livestock, through an obscured ranch inheritance, to an amateur mountaineer who disappeared years before climbing Ship Rock mountain.
  

The novel is a police procedural as well as a mystery. The procedures are that of sharp and desert-wise police work on the Navajo Reservation, and the mystery has plenty of odd side-trails and misdirections. The Navaho Tribal Police watch over a wide, far-horizon countryside with its people relatively few and far between; yet there are many little and big secrets and surprises in the desert and among the desert dwellers. Hillerman ties all his elements together: a set of lawmen more or less working to the same ends; Indians and big ranchers and tourists; the wild free openness of the desert, inviting but unforgiving; and deadly danger.

The rather diffident Jim Chee has grown in responsibilities and confidence. There's also a romance winding slow like a river in flat country: quiet, but with curves where you don't expect them.

The Fallen Man is an enjoyable novel, working folks with a tangle of mystery, all set in a fine evocation of the Southwestern desert.
  

There are a couple of very nice full-page photographs of Ship Rock as well as other beautiful Four Corners landscapes in the Tony Hillerman mysteries' companion volume, Hillerman Country.

© 2008 Robert Wilfred Franson