For my first book review of 2025, I’m delighted to discuss The Tale Teller, the 23rd book of the long-running Leaphorn and Chee detective series.
Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee Series
The first eighteen books of the Leaphorn and Chee series, penned by the legendary Tony Hillerman, are not just stories, but literary masterpieces. Hillerman’s beautifully descriptive prose, historical accuracy, and great reverence for the Navaho Nation make his work a must-read for those who appreciate the art of storytelling and the rich culture of the American southwest.
Tony Hillerman died in 2008, and his most famous series, which chronicled the cases of Tribal Policeman Joe Leephorn and his protege Jim Chee, has been continued by his daughter Anne Hillerman to critical acclaim.
Anne Hillerman Writes Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito
Anne Hillerman has kept the spirit of her father’s works and brought them to new heights with The Spider Woman’s Daughter, the nineteenth book in the series,
With Anne Hillerman at the helm, the series underwent a change. She added a fully formed female Navajo investigator, Officer Bernie Manuelito, to the cast and brought back Joe Leaphorn from the dead—alive after a gunshot to the brain. Leaphorn struggles to speak English and connect with others the way he did in previous books.
Anne Hillerman returns to her fictionalized version of the Navajo Nation in The Tale Teller, where two parallel investigations merge past and present pain and weave together how old wounds cast long shadows.
The Story
Retired from the tribal police, Joe Leaphorn now lives a life of quiet seclusion with his housemate Louisa Bourbonette, a professor at a nearby college. His days are a constant struggle, spent with a few friends, fielding calls from tribal police officers, and battling through speech therapy to regain his lost English speaking skills, a daily reminder of the gunshot wound that changed his life years ago.
However, his peaceful solitude is broken when Daisy Pinto, the local Navajo museum director, calls him with a baffling puzzle. The museum had recently acquired an anonymous donation that held many priceless Navajo artifacts. However, two are missing from the inventory list: a relatively inexpensive silver bracelet and a priceless traditional Navajo dress that was thought to have been made by Navajo Chief Manuelito’s wife, Juanita, on The Long Walk.
The Long Walk (1863-1868)
Beginning in January 1863, the Long Walk was a period of the forced relocation of over 9,000 Navajo from their central homelands to the Bosque Redondo reservation, where they remained until a treaty allowed them to return to a small portion of their original lands.
During The Long Walk, the Navajo people were forced to march over 250 miles in the dead of winter to be interned; hundreds of people died on the march due to disease, starvation, and cold. Many others were killed by US governmental soldiers for being unable to keep pace.
Upon arrival at Bosque Redondo, the soldiers also forced assimilation by not allowing the Navajo to speak their native language or practice any Navajo cultural or religious customs. With inadequate food, shelter, or water, many Navajo perished during their long internment until a treaty was signed with the US government, which allowed them to return to only a tiny portion of their ancestral lands in 1868.
Resources to learn more:
The Story Continued:
Leaphorn, despite his initial negative feelings towards the slightly frenetic Daisy Pinto, whose retirement is only a week away, decides to take up the case to help find this precious dress made during one of the most horrific and deeply terrible times in Navajo history.
Leaphorn begins his investigation with Pinto’s assistant at the museum, Tiffany, but she is found dead soon after he takes up the case. Tiffany, a young woman, has been battling a mysterious illness for several weeks before dying. Tiffany’s father believes that the artifacts given to the museum carried evil spirits and were unclean, and Tiffany died from handling them. Pinto believes that witchcraft is not to blame for Tiffany’s death, nor does she want rumors that Tiffany stole the dress and the artisan bracelet to spread, so she asks Leaphorn to track down the anonymous donor to see if they forgot to send the dress.
After a few days, Leaphorn tracks down the maker of the missing artisan bracelet and can find no reason for it being stolen- it’s relatively inexpensive, and the jeweler had made several similar items, which, although finely crafted, were not particularly valuable.
Leaphorn also tracks down the owner of the priceless traditional dress. He is an eccentric man who wishes to return this artifact to its rightful owners after owning it for so long. He proves that the dress was shipped, and now Leaphorn must dig into the past to find out where the dress went and why it was stolen.
Meanwhile Chee and Manuelito….
Officer Bernie Manuelito is investigating a rash of burglaries on the reservation. The thief or thieves seem to be especially interested in small goods of personal value. The latest was a bolo tie from an elderly Navajo man. As Manuelito and Chee investigate these thefts, they realize that it isn’t just petty crime- but that they’ve stumbled on a blackmail case with a young, beautiful Navajo woman at the center- she knows something about the crimes but refuses to talk even after her grandfather is shot over his missing bolo tie.
Manuelito, in need of a mental escape, starts her day with an early morning run. As she descends the mountains, she stumbles upon a shocking sight-a man’s lifeless body on the hiking trail, with only a small dog as a witness. Manuelito, taking charge, secures the scene and reaches out to the FBI. With its expertise, the bureau becomes deeply involved in the investigation, engaging the audience in the unfolding mystery.
So just to recap:
- Leaphorn is looking for a missing Navajo dress and a missing bracelet.
- Manuelito is solving a rash of burglaries, which is really a blackmail plot that almost leads to a murder of an old man over a silver bolo tie.
- Chee is also Manuelito’s supporting character in this story.
The Review
The Tale Teller is a remarkable book that begins each of its interlocking mysteries with a small problem: a missing dress and bracelet, a stolen silver bolo, and an unknown dead hiker, which soon widen out to larger crimes but also into problems that have been gifted through generations. These minor incidents result from traumas traveling underneath the surface until they cannot be ignored or kept in darkness for another minute.
The Tale Teller really meditates on how The Long Walk caused a wound to the Navajo Nation that the younger generations may never know because their great-grandparents and grandparents have suffered in silence or attempted to erase any memory of this terrible time.
However, memories cast long shadows.
The Tale Teller delves into how traumas can impact an entire nation, as seen in Leaphrn’s quest to find the missing dress, and how they can also affect entire families. Secret jealousies, when left unchecked, can tear families apart, leading to the destruction of a central cultural tenant. This loss underscores the importance of cultural understanding, as it is often these deeply rooted aspects of a culture that are most vulnerable to such destructive forces.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
By not knowing what colonization has done to you, you can inadvertently repeat the atrocities. With a masterful touch, Hillerman shows how small selfish acts can reverberate across generations, creating a web of interconnected consequences. It’s the reason the stealing of a bolo tie almost leads to assassination, it’s the reason a priceless Navajo dress is stolen, it’s the reason Tiffany dies, and it’s also the reason a career criminal is found dead on a hiking trail one morning.
Hillerman’s writing unfolds in a thematically melodic way, with the beauty of the natural landscape almost lulling into a sense of peace. His mastery is evident in the stark contrast he draws between the grandeur and incredible natural beauty of the setting and the petty meanness of the characters. Their crimes, echoing from generation to generation, serve as a poignant reminder of the lasting impact of their actions and the enduring consequences of human behavior.
Anne Hillerman’s writing is so descriptive and wonderous but also repetitive. The repetitive reintroduction of Joe Leaphorn’s inability to speak English, which happens at least once a paragraph when he’s the story’s focus, grated on me while I listened to the book. It felt incredibly jarring compared to her other books, where Leaphorn also struggled with his spoken English, and I was really thrown off. If it is supposed to be an extended metaphor about how the Navajo lost their language and struggled to speak English- living in this vague hinterland of neither English nor Navajo, it didn’t quite land for me. There wasn’t enough connective tissue to intuitively make this leap while reading the book. Instead, I felt 25 pages could have been chopped out by removing all the references to Leaphorn’s continued struggle with speaking English.
If it is an extended metaphor, it’s also going to be lost in the vast shuffle or plot, musings on trauma, the historical legacy of the Long Walk and Leaphorn’s burgeoning feeling for his housemate Louisa- which sort of simmer under the surface the entirety of the book, but I won’t get into that whole subplot because I still have to get to Manuelito’s TWO mysteries.
So a stolen bolo tie leads to an attempted murder, and a young woman confesses that she’s being blackmailed, and because she can’t pay, the blackmailer shoots her grandfather. In case you’re bored by the philosophical musings of Leaphorn’s case- there’s a whole rough-and-tumble manhunt that leads to a good old-fashioned western shootout- with Manuelito literally kicking ass and taking names.
When Manuelito isn’t literally kicking ass, she’s becoming sort of best friends with a female FBI agent- with whom I was picking up definite romantic vibes, and I thought this was going to lead to a romantic subplot, with Manuelito cheating on Chee, who is oddly absent throughout this book.
As I listened to the book, I became somewhat convinced that Anne Hillerman would like to write a Manuelito mystery without the baggage of Joe Leaphorn because these two main characters are tussling for center stage. Hillerman can’t cut Leaphorn out of the series—it’s his series, after all—but there’s tension in having three main characters who are all investigators.
They all have to be investigati crimes at the same time- which are all wrapped up in a satisfying way. This set up leads to overly complex plots, having to keep recaping the reader of previous plot points, switching between stories and trying to resove everything with narrative sense. There’s also a plethora of complex social relationships: Chee and Manuelito are married, Chee is also her boss in this book. Leaphorn is Chee’s mentor, Leaphorn is also occasionally Manuelito’s mentor. Manuelito might want to rank up….this list could go on and on.
However, strikingly absent from this neverending web is Chee, who is almost entirely eclipsed by his costars. After reading The Tale Teller, I couldn’t tell you his role in the story. His entire character has been reduced to a single plot point: Manuelito’s husband. Hopefully, in future books, he gets off the sidelines and has a meaty investigation.
On the whole Hillerman does a good job weaving these complex relationships into the story, but it’s a lot to keep track of and sometimes I felt like it was starting to feel like a hat on a hat, with some relationships and back stories and repetitive handwringing about job satisfaction and challenging love lives adding too much bulk to an already dense story.
The Tale Teller is a fantastically written book with themes and characters to return to again and again. It’s the kind of book that makes me feel like if I read it again, I’d learn new lessons, have new revelations and deeper questions to ponder.
Golden Age of Detective Fiction 
Leave a comment