Coyote Waits

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 show more 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. show less

Enjoyable series and this one doesn't disappoint. Character development was especially enjoyable as were the evocative landscape descriptions. There were a couple implausible aspects with the inclusion of Ji, an extraneous Vietnamese character which didn't add to the storyline . However, intertwining the Coyote myth with a current murder mystery was clever.

Landscape and realism great as usual, but killing off Delbert Nez felt awkward,
as did the oddly paced Vietnamese sequences, making the mystery tough to follow.

The best so far of the Tony Hillerman mysteries, with Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Chee lets another tribal policeman chase what the latter considers a vandal, and ends up pulling his dead friend from a burning car. His guilt pushes him to investigate, even though he arrested the man everyone presumes is the murderer, an old man walking drunk down the highway after the shooting, holding the murder weapon and a bottle of Dewars.

Joe Leaphorn is approached by distant relations of his late wife, people related to the man Chee arrested, to investigate, because they can't imagine he would ever kill anyone.

Naturally, the two policemen cross paths, not immediately, but in a satisfying way at the end. It's not the beginning of a beautiful show more friendship - but maybe something else.

Very satisfying in every way. 5 stars. show less

Coyote Waits was an excellent mystery, but I thought that Chee was sometimes annoying and whiny. Since he'd been badly injured at the beginning of the book and was in pain he had a right to whine, however, that wasn't what he was complaining about. He thought, without anything to back it up, that Leaphorn thought he was a screw-up and that he was investigating the case either to backup Chee's work or to prove his point. None of that was true and, though I probably should have found that funny, instead it made me roll my eyes. His wish for a relationship with Janet Pete, who doesn't show much interest in him, was another issue. I began to wonder if he's a glutton for punishment. He seems to choose the wrong women to pursue. All that show more aside, the mystery itself was well plotted and thought out. It was fun for Hillerman to add a bit of western lore to the plot. On to the Sacred Clowns. show less

Idly rummaging through some used books on the salvaged table at the village recycling station, the cover of this book caught my eye. Seeing it was one of Tony Hillerman's books, I began thumbing through it and recognized the book as one of the Joe Leaphorn / Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series I'd read (likely in the 1990s).

Academics, murderous villainy, rattlesnakes, skinwalkers, and even Butch Cassidy all mix in the twists of this tale. Coyote is a trickster in much of Native American myth, and Coyote's imposed fate plays a guiding role in the solution of this plot's puzzle. 'Gently impressive mystery fiction' is the best phrase I've come across to describe Tony Hillerman's writing.

I've found Tony Hillerman's books an enjoyable show more pastime over the years, and having spent a little time in the Four Corners region could easily visualize the settings. show less

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.