The Shape Shifter
Tony Hillerman
Published 2006 by Harper Collins
Another nice crime/detective/police novel by Hillerman. (I read a few before, but this is the first one I am writing about here). The setting is the same as in most of his books - the Navajo lands in New Mexico/Colorado in USA. The detectives are chiefly from the Navajo Tribal Police, and though the crime and its detection is not directly connected with the Navajo culture, it plays out with that in the background. So we get a lot of information about native Indian customs, all of it sympathetic, with occasional direct attacks on the white 'European' culture that destroyed a lot of it. This is usual for Hillerman. In this book he also introduces Tommy Vang, a Hmong, who has been 'imported' from Laos/Vietnam to serve one of the characters in the book. There is long section in which the protagonist, retired Lt. Joe Leaphorn, formerly of the Navajo Tribal Police, has a conversation with Vang. They compare their respective cultures and find similarities in the way they kept getting pushed out of their native homelands to satisfy the greed of their 'conquerors' for land or natural resources. This particular awful treatment of the native Indians by the whites has been earlier described (harshly and sarcastically) by Joseph Heller in Catch 22. The Hmong were badly treated by not only the Chinese and the Vietnamese, but also the Americans during the Vietnam war.
The crime story moves a bit slowly, and not till the last few chapters does it get really interesting. The climactic pages are excellent, though rather too brief. All in all, a good read.
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