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The Shape Shifter ReviewTony Hillerman's Navajo series includes a few of the best books in the genre: Skinwalkers, A Thief of Time, and Coyote Waits, for example. But for some years now, the books have been poorly written and what is more tiresome, miserably edited. HarperCollins obviously doesn't see any reason to clean up a Hillerman manuscript. They are ignore contradictions, spelling and grammar errors, mistakes with names, and inconsistencies. And the fulsome reviews that sell the books at Amazon justify HC's contempt for readers.
This book is terrible. It is full of tired diction. The pat phrase overused in this one is "Lt. Leaphorn, retired": start keeping count when you get bored. It's not as irritating as "the legendary Lieutenant" (which turns up occasionally), but it gets old fast.
The "experimenting" with chronology is simply bad plotting. Joe can't be "retired a few months" if Jim and Bernie are married, except in an alternate universe. And Louisa is apparently not living with him any more, but he's forgotten she ever did, so it's Ok. In fact, maybe we are supposed to think Joe is getting senile, because at one point he ponders that something was "why he had decided to go home"; the problem? He's in a motel room for the night, obviously not "going home."
But the real clincher is the crime itself. As the story develops, we are supposed to believe that an international mega-criminal worth millions would set up an elaborate robbery of a trading post in the middle of the Navajo rez. At the end, Leaphorn mentions the genius of the guy because "he always left no witnesses." Unfortunately, he says this to one of the three witnesses to the trading post crime; in fact, one of three accomplices he spents weeks with and then betrayed to the police. Fortunately, the witness is too polite to contradict him... those Navajos, always polite.
At one point, Hillerman seems to realize that the trading post robbery seems a bit, well, out of character for his mega-criminal. So he quickly does some self-justifying math. He points out that the post took in about $100 a day and they often didn't bank the money for weeks. Oh, that's different. The worth millions arch criminal stakes the place out for months so he can score 2 or 3 grand, for which he commits multiple murders! Not only ruthless and arch, but petty.
Anyone who calls this one of Hillerman's best is insulting him. I have pages of reviews of his books and others like it at my site; this book is embarrassing. With the millions Hillerman has made in the Chee/Leaphorn franchise, he could hire an editor of his own to keep these books up to the standard Hillerman himself set and few have equalled. Instead, he is cranking out feeble imitations of his own work.
The Shape Shifter Overview Retirement has never sat well with former Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. Now the ghosts of a still-unsolved case are returning to haunt him, reawakened by a photograph in a magazine spread of a one-of-a-kind Navajo rug, a priceless work of woven art that was supposedly destroyed in a suspicious fire many years earlier. The rug, commemorating one of the darkest and most terrible chapters in American history, was always said to be cursed, and now the friend who brought it to Leaphorn's attention has mysteriously gone missing.
With newly wedded officers Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito just back from their honeymoon, the legendary ex-lawman is on his own to pick up the threads of a crime he'd once thought impossible to untangle. And they're leading him back into a world of lethal greed, shifting truths, and changing faces, where a cold-blooded killer still resides.
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