Loaded with e-book extras (not available in the print edition), including Tony Hillerman's running commentary on his work and his series heroes Leaphorn and Chee; plus a special profile of the Navajo nation.
Officer Chee attempts to solve two modern murders by deciphering the sacred clown's ancient message to the people of the Tano pueblo.
AN ANCIENT TRUST IS BROKEN
During a Tano kachina ceremony something in the antics of the dancing koshare fills the air with tension. Moments later the clown is found brutally bludgeoned in the same manner that a reservation schoolteacher was killed just days before.
In true Navajo style, Officer Jim Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Tribal Police go back to the beginning to decipher the sacred clown's message to the people of the Tano pueblo. Amid guarded tribal secrets and crooked Indian traders, they find a trail of blood that links a runaway schoolboy, two dead bodies, and the mysterious presence of a sacred artifact.
At first, Officer Jim Chee had felt foolish sitting on the roof of the house of some total stranger. But that uneasiness had soon faded. Now this vantage point on the roof had come to seem one of Cowboy Dashee's rare good ideas. Chee could see almost everywhere from here. The drummers directly beneath the tips of his freshly shined boots, the column of masked dancers just entering the plaza to his left, the crowd of spectators jammed along the walls of the buildings, the sales booths lining the narrow streets beyond, he looked down on all of it. And out over the flat crowded roofs of Tano Pueblo, he could rest his eyes on the ragged row of cottonwoods along the river, golden today with autumn, or upon the blue mountains blocking the horizon, or the greentan-silver patchwork of farm fields the Tanoans irrigated.
It was an excellent perch from which to witness the Tanoan kachina dance--for duty as well as pleasure. Especially with the warm, jeans-clad thigh of Janet Pete pressed against him. If Delmar Kanitewa was present, Chee would be likely to see him. If the boy didn't show up, then there was no better place from which to watch the ceremonial. Such mystical rituals had always fascinated Chee. Since boyhood Chee had wanted to follow Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai. In the Navajo family structure Nakai was Chee's "Little Father," his mother's elder brother. Nakai was a shaman of the highest order. He was a hataalii--what the whites called a singer, or medicine man. He was respected for his knowledge of the traditional religion and of the curing ways the Holy People had taught to keep humankind in harmony with the reality that surrounds us all. Nakai worked along that narrow line that separates flesh and spirit. Since boyhood, that had interested Chee.
"On the roof is where they like visitors to sit when they're having a kachina dance," Dashee had said. "It gets you tourists out from underfoot. Unless you fall off, there's a lot less chance you'll do something stupid and mess up
the ceremony. And it leaves room around the dance ground for the Tano people. They need to exchange gifts with the kachinas. Things like that."
Dashee was a sworn deputy sheriff of Apache County, Arizona, a Hopi of his people's ancient Side Corn Clan, and Jim Chee's closest friend. But he could also be a pain in the butt.
"But what if I spot the kid?" Chee had asked. "Is he going to wait while I climb down?"
"Why not? He won't know you're looking for him." Cowboy had then leaned against Janet Pete and confided in a stage whisper, "The boy'll think Detective Chee would be over there in Thoreau working on that big homicide. "
"You know," Asher Davis said, "I'll bet I know that guy. There was a teacher at that Saint Bonaventure School--one of those volunteers--who called me a time or two to see if I could get a good price for something some old-timer had to sell. One time it was a little silver pollen container--looked late nineteenth century--and some jerk in Farmington had offered this old man two dollars for it. I got him two hundred and fifty. I wonder if that was the teacher who got killed."
"His name was Dorsey," Chee said, sounding slightly grouchy. He didn't know Davis and wasn't sure he'd like him. But maybe that was just the mood he was in.
"Dorsey," Davis said. "That's him."
"See?" Cowboy said. "Officer Chee keeps up on those serious crimes. And he also has time to write letters to the editor telling the Tano council what to do with its old uranium mines."
Chee had been ignoring Dashee's needling all morning. At first it had been based on the letter, published in that morning's edition of the Navajo Times.
"[Hillerman's] clowns are . . . Every bit as raucous, profane and funny as Shakespeare's."
"A well-braided, spell-binding yarn . . . Mr. Hillerman's novels inject fresh urgency to the age-old question about good and evil . . . [Hillerman] is at the top of his form."
"How long can Tony Hillerman keep it up? . . . Sacred Clowns is as good as anything he's done -- as flavorful as beef jerky, so evocative of the land around the Four Comers area of New Mexico that even if you've never been there, you'll think you have."
Tony Hillerman is past president of Mystery Writers of America and has received their Edgar and Grand Master awards. His other honors include the Center for the American Indian's Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for the best novel set in the West, the Navaho Tribe's Special Friend Award, the National Media Award from the American Anthropological Association, the Public Service Award from the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Nero Wolfe Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book, Honorary Life Membership in the Western Literature Association, and the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere. In addition to his election to Phi Beta Kappa, Tony Hillerman has been named Doctor of Humane Letters at Arizona State University and at Portland University. He lives with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, NM.
