PopSyndicate.com

Beads, blankets and the worst day in Navajo history.

The Shape Shifter is a one-of-a-kind story that leaves playing cowboys and Indians in the dirt.  You settle back in your seat and start turning the pages and can’t stop.  It’s a mystifying adventure of Navajo legend mixed in with today’s world and told in a laid back manner by Tony Hillerman.  This is a sleeper, but the story keep whacking you on the back of the head to continue on through it pages to find out what happens next.  Is it adventure and romance?  No.  It’s folklore, magic and the modern world thrown together.

Take a gutsy retired Navajo Tribal police detective by the last name of Leaphorn who receives a picture out of a culture magazine sent to him by a friend.  In it is a beautiful home and gracing the living room is a Navajo rug that was thought to have been burned years earlier when the home burned to the ground.  The rug was made years earlier by the Navajo women who traveled through Oklahoma during the land settlement agreement with the US Government and it contains feathers and other memorabilia from that part of the worst years of the Navajo history. 

Leaphorn tries to reach his friend but his wife answers instead and says she hasn’t seen her husband for some three days.  Not like him to disappear like that.  Leaphorn decides to investigate just what is going on and starts his search in Flagstaff, Arizona with an antiquities dealer.

Hillerman has written at least eighteen other book with Leaphorn as the detective and this is his first I’ve read.  I don’t know how that happened, but it did.  His writing is laid back and full of Navajo talk and jargon.  He’s done his research well to come up with each book and The Shape Shifter is no different.

I liked The Shape Shifter with it jokes and asides about Navajo life versus life outside the reservation.  Some were downright funny.  Leaphorn certainly is a go-getter and stays with the task all the way to the end.  I liked the style of writing which was easy to read.  There were passages I re-read, but not because I did not understand them; I wanted to etch them further into my mind.  It’s a very good book.

3