The Fallen Man

by Tony Hillerman

Ebook, 2009

Library's rating

Library's review

Joe Leaphorn has finally retired from the Navajo Tribal Police and Jim Chee has been named acting lieutenant. The young Navajo policeman quickly discovers that greater status mostly means greater amounts of paperwork, while he's still at the mercy of Captain Largo for his assignments. Of course,
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Leaphorn can't keep his nose out of anything on the reservation, so he ends up back in the thick of it as a newly discovered body on a sacred mountain is revealed to be a man whose disappearance was investigated by Leaphorn years ago. Was it an accident or murder (I mean, you already know the answer to that one, right?)? And who done it?

Once again I have no quibble with the actual plot, but I'm sick of Chee's romantic soap opera and irritated that after mooning after one woman for several books in a row before catching her, he now appears ready to toss her aside in favor of a cute young Navajo policewoman. In other words, I think Chee's a dink. Meanwhile, Leaphorn's love life is strangely nonexistent after having undergone a revitalization in the last book when he was preparing to head off on a romantic trip to Asia with his anthropologist friend. She, like the title victim, has apparently fallen off the face of the earth, a place I'm beginning to wish most of the regular characters would follow her to.
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Description

Lieutenant Leaphorn of the Navajo tribal police comes out of retirement for a solution to a case which eluded him 11 years earlier. The case was the disappearance of a local rancher, shortly after he inherited money, while on a hiking trip with his wife. Now his skeleton has been found.

Awards

Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 1998)

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

1996
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