Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This is the sixth of Hillerman's "Navajo Detective" series and the third in which Jim Chee is the main character. In "Ghostway" Hillerman explores the conflict of a Navajo drawn to the White world. Jim Chee is in love with a White school teacher, Mary Landon, and he contemplates marrying her and leaving the reservation to take a job as an FBI agent. But he is also pulled in the opposite direction to become a "singer" and preserve the Navajo ceremonies that are being forgotten as the old timers die off. Chee's preoccupation with the personal choices he must make are always near the surface of this mystery novel.
Hillerman, as always, celebrates the magnificience of the Navajo land and the Navajo's sensitivity to their natural surroundings. And, as always, the knowledge of their land and people give Hillerman's detectives the insight they need to solve the mystery.
"Ghostway" begins with a shootout in the parking lot of a laundromat in Shiprock, New Mexico that leaves two men dead. The story is not one of Hillerman's best or most credible but the character of Margaret Sosi, an entrancing, 15-year old girl wearing a black pea coat makes up for plot deficiencies. We want this girl to live -- but Hillerman readers know he has cruelly killed off children in other novels in the series.
Hillerman novels contain no sex whatsoever, but "Ghostway" comes closer than about any other to intimating that Jim Chee and Mary Landon might have engaged in something more than romantic conversation.
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