★★★★☆ These rabbits are too big to come out of these hats

Lost Birds

Anne Hillerman

I count myself a hard-core fan of Tony and Anne Hillerman's Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito mystery series, now clocking in at 27 novels, Lost Birds being the latest, the ninth by Anne Hillerman. It is difficult to keep a series going that long without becoming formulaic. I am sorry to say that Hillerman does not completely succeed. If you're like me, you're always happy to spend time with Joe, Chee, Bernie, and the Diné -- they're old friends, and you don't need them to have fresh new exciting things to tell you.

In fact, they kind of do have new stuff going on -- too much so. We meet Kory, the son of Joe's squeeze Louisa. Joe and Louisa are a familiar presence, but if we have ever before heard that Louisa had a son, I missed it, and Kory is A LOT. Aside from the Kory subplot, we have two main mysteries, one having to do with a school custodian whose wife has vanished, and the second with a woman who was adopted as a child and has come to Joe looking for her Navajo roots. It is this second mystery that gives the novel its title. The lost bird mystery is well written.

The missing wife mystery is, like Kory, another case that feels like pulling too big a rabbit from too small a hat -- trying too hard. The solution to this mystery feels overly complicated, with a lot of red herrings dangled before the reader along the way, and characters behaving in ways that don't really make a lot of sense considering what we are given to know about them.

Still, as I said, I'm always happy to spend time with Joe and Chee and Bernie. If you're considering reading book 27 of a 27-book series, you're probably also a hard-core fan, and I don't think you'll be disappointed. But the series is showing strain.

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