Excellent escapism: Picked this up at Albuquerque airport after five days home in the Four Corners and devoured it in one sitting on the plane ride home. Hillerman captures the Southwestern USA as a character like Randy Wayne White captures Southwest Florida, Robert Goddard captures Southwest England or Jim Thompson captured Texas.
The pacing and economical emptiness of writing of Hillerman's books goes perfectly with the climate and geography where they are set. Spend some time on Native American lands and you'll get the point. Hillerman has the New Mexico/Southwest/reservation/Four Corners nailed -- at least, one big aspect of it. His books also are unique -- no one else has carved out the same niche.
I liked the realism of the law enforcement officers jumping to a quick conclusion about how the killing went down that might not stand up to scrutiny. There are cases like the one in the book where it's just very easy not to look a whole lot further, and candid cops will tell you that.
I also like Chee and Leaphorn and how Hillerman gives us two complementary characters, the one older and wiser but perhaps a tad closed to originality, the other younger and more impulsive but also more able to look outside the lines, think outside the box.
Thoroughly entertaining, quick read.

Taking place on home territory, this story shakes Jim Chee up and brings Leaphorn and Chee together with tension between the two - which is interesting reading, since I continue to persist in thinking of them as friends (!). Mr. Hillerman continues to explore the personal lives of his two famous policeman while telling a compelling mystery and even pulling in the persistent rumors of Butch Cassidy surviving the run-in down in South America. Enjoyable read, done well. ( )

Veteran mystery writer Tony Hillerman turns out one of his better efforts in Coyote Waits, a Leaphorn/Chee detective story. Hillerman's stories always bear certain commonalities. One of these features is that the lead protagonists, Leaphorn and Chee never seem to both be fully on active duty with the Navajo Tribal Police while they are tracking down a mystery that is somehow just outside their authority. Leaphorn is still on active duty in this one, but Chee is on medical leave because of burns he suffers in the fiery death of a fellow officer.

Hillerman's mysteries are typically well-constructed with more than one plausible villain. But Hillerman's weaving of Navajo culture and the desert southwest landscape into the heart of his stories gives them their distinctive character. In Coyote Waits the accused killer is a gentle old Navajo medicine man who has been earning money relating Navajo tales to anthropologists.

The accused is represented by Janet Pete, a lawyer with the federal public defender, a Navajo, and maybe Chee's girlfriend. That relationship, however, introduces some implausible elements. Chee was the arresting officer of her client, but then they work together trying to find out whether the old man really did it or not. Apparently it is too much to expect Hillerman to examine this conflict of interest and improper communication with a material witness.

And of course it would not be a Hillerman book without at least one editing blunder - a conversation involving has the speaker first identified as Chee, then Leaphorn, and then Chee. But that was the only one I noticed, a much better record than his more recent books.

In Coyote Waits, Hillerman delivers his trademark southwestern, Navajo tribal mystery without a lot of other frills. Great literature it's not, but it is distinctive within the mystery genre and well worth a read. ( )

I have all the Sayers, Stout, Ellis Peters and Laurie King books, my mom has all the Hillerman books. We trade back and forth. This is not so much a review of Coyote Waits as an opinion of the Hillerman works. The only thing lacking to make these ideal for me is humor, but it wouldn't work to have them be silly. There is so much interesting information about the Dineh and other history of the Southwest and the characters and mysteries are great. Also, I don't think he throws in sexual activity to liven up the story. That's a plus and hard to find in modern writers. ( )