The Wailing Wind.

• Author: Rogers, C.D.

by Tony Hillerman

Even the title The Wailing Wind--of Tony Hillerman's best-selling, fifteenth mystery featuring the crime-solving Navajos Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee--contains the puzzle: what, where, when, who, and so what? But aren't we lawyers known for solving puzzles?

The narrative starts with Officer Bernadette Manuelito discovering a dead body in a pickup truck blocking the path "up the bottom of the dry wash." What happened? In seeking Hillerman's clues, we compete with the Navajo protagonists to solve the homicide.

They, however, hold the advantage until we rediscover the importance of setting: the contemporary Navajo Indian Reservation in the corners of Arizona and New Mexico. The detailed maps (within both front and back covers) contain clues to both solution and recognition of a society's influences on legal concepts. Leaphorn and Chee know the geographical site of the seeds on the dead man's shoes, the Spanish legends of the lost gold mine (The Golden Calf), and the Indian ways (diversity of both culture and perception). For example, the reluctance to be a witness comes from the Navajos' belief that incarceration is useless. Instead, they diagnose the cause and provide the curing ceremony "to bring back health and harmony." The Navajos (without the written language to preserve their culture) also respect the spoken word so much they never interrupt a speaker. Similarly, in asking questions, the Navajo way is respected: Rituals exist in human relationships. Regard for time differs from our "court-house rush."

Those who have followed Hillerman's "way" through two-dozen or-more books find the most clues in this latest novel in the characterization of Leaphorn, now mentor to the younger Chee. Both become experts in understanding the relationship of the past and the present and of using this understanding to master the present. Hillerman (tonyhillermanbooks.com) shares the...