Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Sorry! Anne Hillerman really misses almost every mark in this effort. While the writing is clear, the major components of a good Leaphorn-Chee continuation series (even with a new focus on Bernie Manuelito as the protagonist) are sadly diluted and missing. First, the plot line. A dramatic bombing at a high-school basketball tournament is dragged (not developed) through a likely assault on a Tribal mediator working on another of the endlessly disputed projects regarding land use and protecting the sacred soil of Navajo-land. Except, it isn't really about any of this in the end. All the drama that ensues is, for the most part, a misdirection and the final resolution of the plot is woefully unsupportive of the build-up to the conclusion. At best, it's a C-minus story. The characters are not themselves, but caricatures of whom they used to be in the earlier works. Joe Leaphorn (the Legendary Lieutenant) is given a very minor presence, and since he suffered a traumatic brain injury in the first book of this series, Ms. Hillerman has still not come to grips with how to use him to advance the plot development. We see Joe struggling to communicate, preferring to use the written word, e.g. emails rather than speaking, to give advice and counsel. Because the character is now so limited and so peripheral, I wonder why Ms. Hillerman even includes him in the narrative. Nostalgia may be one motivation, I suppose. Jim Chee really has never recovered from the change in authorship. Where once he was a reflective, perhaps sometimes brooding character, torn between adapting his desire to be a medicine man (Singer) with the realities of being a Navajo policeman, he's now given only a few limited dimensions: 1) he's got an assignment that he doesn't care for much because it involves politicians; 2) he doesn't like being away from Bernie. That's it for Jim. Bernie's portrait is almost as dimensionless as Chee's, although as the protagonist she does have more facets that drive the plot forward. Like Chee in the earlier stories (including The Spider Woman's Daughter, Anne Hillerman's 1st novel in the series) Bernie was shown to be a reflective woman, struggling with how to be a Navajo policewoman, dealing with family, and torn between a "crush" and a "romance" with Jim Chee. In this novel, Bernie is pretty much "all-business" and the demands of the job push almost all the human intrigue of a normal life into the background. I know this next comment is going to send the die-hard Hillerman afficionados over the top, but I have to say this particular book was redolent with the same themes as the Ella Clah series by Aimee and David Thorlo. As I read "Song of the Lion" I really did have trouble keeping a distinction between the characters of Bernie Manuelito and Ella Clah. That Shiprock is home to both heroines makes the comparison hard to miss, plus in this episode Bernie also receives a mountain lion fetish which parallels the badger fetish so prominent in the Thorlo's stories. The pacing of the stories also seem similar, to me. Finally, maybe it's bad editing or typesetting (I've noticed more and more of this in several popular mystery thrillers) but I have to say that the clues that were dropped (including dropping the villain's name and his connection with the plot-- about half-way through the story) continues to show the struggles with plot development and story that plagues the two latest books by Anne Hillerman.