Spider Woman's Daughter by Anne Hillerman

Crossposted from Blogetary:

A couple of weeks ago the Kindle version of Spider Woman's Daughter by Anne Hillerman was on sale for like $2.99 or something like that. It had been years since I had read a Tony Hillerman book, so I was interested to see what his daughter would do with this series.

When I first discovered Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn I lived in the cloudy, rainy north it was a relief to read about the hot, dry landscape, the sun beating down, the drives into the middle of nowhere on dirt roads and washes. Reading about families from a different culture, different climate, different belief systems, was like dipping into a summer lake. It was refreshing, it woke me up, in a sense. The stories were about more than just catching the murderer or finding the smugglers of drugs or tribal artifacts. They were about Joe Leaphorn's relationship with his wife Emma, and later with Louisa. They were about Jim Chee's working with his uncle to learn about becoming a haataali, balancing that with his duties as a police officer and his affections for a thoroughly modern woman, and then realizing that he would need to make some choices on his road. Officer Chee was the full on romantic in the series and it felt right.

I wasn't sure if this new book by Tony Hillerman's daughter would be the same dip into a refreshing lake, but it was darn close. In Spider Woman's Daughter, the story is told mostly from Officer Bernadette Manuelita's (Bernie) point of view. Within the first few pages, she sees Joe Leaphorn shot at point blank range and vows to find the killer. She's taken off the case since she is a witness to it, but still ends up helping her husband Sergeant Chee (yes, that Chee) with it.

I think it was a wise move on the author's part to focus on Bernie's part of the story. She does add in Chee's POV occasionally, but only after grounding the reader fully on Bernie. In telling the story this way it's clear that Hillerman is not trying to retell her father's stories. She's not trying to be the storyteller for Leaphorn and Chee, though she still includes them in the story. It is evident that instead she is carrying the world her father created forward but through a fresh pair of eyes.

In the past, readers saw the agnostic Leaphorn juxtaposed to the Chee's faith and how they were able to do the job best when working together. Now, added to those two, woven through the story in much the same way that Spider Woman's daughter (of the title) taught weaving to the People, is Bernie. From Bernie, the reader gets a more balanced view of someone balancing family demands with work, and her faith is much more lived than Chee's faith.

After reading this all the way through I have to give it a firm thumbs up. I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were a couple of missteps in the story: a couple of times a name was misspelled, another time it felt like a couple of elements were dropped and allowed to hang a little too long for my taste. But it was still enjoyable, and like many of the other stories in this series, takes the officers back over a former case that teases at the brain cells.

If you're a fan of the Tony Hillerman series and are missing his world, then I say pick this one up next and I don't think you'll be disappointed.