Book Review: Cave of Bones

Cave of Bones: A Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito Novel
Anne Hillerman
Mystery

[WARNING: minor spoilers.]

Cave of Bones nicely illustrates the difference between writing and storytelling. Anne Hillerman is a professional reporter. She can write perfectly good English, and does. It doesn't add up to a story, though.

Without going into exhaustive detail, here are some things that could have been fixed:

• Too much "X felt Y," instead of using dialog and description to show how X felt.
• Some leaden dialogue. Real people do not say things like "I'll make sure that's undisturbed. We want to find a living man, not the ancient dead" unless there's video rolling.
• Several plot threads that don't really reinforce one another.
• An idiot plot, wherein two professional police offers fail to thoroughly search the single most obvious place where they should have searched--or even ask anyone else to do so.

Most importantly, Cave of Bones contains a total lack of pacing. In chapter 2, a man disappears. For the next half of the book, nothing happens that sheds any light on his disappearance. Instead, we get Variations on a Theme of We Still Don't Know Anything. This is one of the worst sins a mystery writer can commit, because mysteries tend to be long on talking and short on action. 

Furthermore, when we do get some movement, it's just random thrashing-around. A previously-minor character contacts the cops, passionately tells them nothing in particular, for no rational reason suddenly runs out and gets lost in the snow. Subsequently, for even less rational reason, he tries to shoot someone. Finally, for absolutely no reason whatsoever rational or otherwise, he manufactures a fake hostage situation. All of this adds up to a certain around of churn, but plot and pacing require directed action.

Perhaps the most vexing, if minor, point in Cave of Bones comes at the end--in the Acknowledgements section. Hillerman thanks "my writer friends, the Literary Ladies," which is gracious and appropriate. And yet . . . the problems here are very obvious, and very few of them are subjective judgments. Anyone could have pointed them out. Why didn't they?

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Anne Hillerman is, of course, the daughter of Tony Hillerman, who famously created the Navajo detectives Leaphorn and Chee and their world. Tony Hillerman isn't my all-time favorite author, in substantial part because most of his books are police procedurals and my first love is the whodunnit. He was a gifted writer, though, with enormous powers of description and an intimate knowledge of the Southwest's native cultures. Among his better books are Thief of Time and The Wailing Wind. Don't watch the PBS adaptations unless you want your intelligence insulted, though.