The Sinister Pig
Jun. 4th, 2019 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfbiterTony Hillerman - The Sinister Pig
(This is a repost from LJ. Note that I have read most – if not all – original stories so I compared this to them)
When a shot white man appears in a strange place, the FBI is in a hurry to declare it their business, take it off the hands of the Navaho law enforcement and then mainly keep quiet about all the evidence. This arouses suspicions of both Jim Chee and Jeo Leaphorn. But this time they are fated to be in the background.
In this story Leaphorn and Chee are effectively just mouthpieces and bystanders. Joe Leaphorn mainly explains the possible political complexities and schemes to Chee and the others (and the reader). Jim Chee is more concerned about Bernadette Manuelito, his latest girlfriend who has quit the Navajo police to join the Customs Service and patrol the US-Mexico border. Mainly accidentally Manuelito gets involved with heavy-duty drug smuggling operation and the bad guys decide to get rid of her, using their spies in the customs service to get more information about her.
This is not Hillerman's usual style. It's obvious from the previous Dinee books (and his memoirs) that Hillerman doesn't really like the FBI, regarding them as sort-of-a political goons with no intention to work for Navajo interests. Now it seems that Hillerman has (IMO somewhat justified) axe to grind; the fact that various oil companies have leeched away most of the royalties from the oil drilling from the tribal areas since the 1880's. In effect they have stolen most of the money that was supposed to have gone into tribal coffers. In addition he uses this tale to state his negative point of view about the US drugs policy, making this book more of a political statement than the Navajo police procedural.
The real protagonists in this tale are Bernadette Manuelito and two of the bad guys, master and servant who turn from relatively realistic models to something out of melodrama. The Master is a bigshot with his own pawns in the Congress, maintaining the War on Drugs that keeps his drug smuggling operation profitable. The servant is a former CIA mercenary with an international warrant over his head. They do everything important, when Chee and Leaphiorn mainly observe, albeit in the form of investigation and never meeting the two men. The apparent political machinations of the nameless and faceless congressmen are so much in the background that the story never actually tells about them.
Hillerman does maintain the narrative tension almost to the end of the book, when the text turns into an infodump. This makes the whole book look like a sideshow of getting Chee more romantically involved with Bernadette, up to and including the hurried marriage proposal.
(This is a repost from LJ. Note that I have read most – if not all – original stories so I compared this to them)
When a shot white man appears in a strange place, the FBI is in a hurry to declare it their business, take it off the hands of the Navaho law enforcement and then mainly keep quiet about all the evidence. This arouses suspicions of both Jim Chee and Jeo Leaphorn. But this time they are fated to be in the background.
In this story Leaphorn and Chee are effectively just mouthpieces and bystanders. Joe Leaphorn mainly explains the possible political complexities and schemes to Chee and the others (and the reader). Jim Chee is more concerned about Bernadette Manuelito, his latest girlfriend who has quit the Navajo police to join the Customs Service and patrol the US-Mexico border. Mainly accidentally Manuelito gets involved with heavy-duty drug smuggling operation and the bad guys decide to get rid of her, using their spies in the customs service to get more information about her.
This is not Hillerman's usual style. It's obvious from the previous Dinee books (and his memoirs) that Hillerman doesn't really like the FBI, regarding them as sort-of-a political goons with no intention to work for Navajo interests. Now it seems that Hillerman has (IMO somewhat justified) axe to grind; the fact that various oil companies have leeched away most of the royalties from the oil drilling from the tribal areas since the 1880's. In effect they have stolen most of the money that was supposed to have gone into tribal coffers. In addition he uses this tale to state his negative point of view about the US drugs policy, making this book more of a political statement than the Navajo police procedural.
The real protagonists in this tale are Bernadette Manuelito and two of the bad guys, master and servant who turn from relatively realistic models to something out of melodrama. The Master is a bigshot with his own pawns in the Congress, maintaining the War on Drugs that keeps his drug smuggling operation profitable. The servant is a former CIA mercenary with an international warrant over his head. They do everything important, when Chee and Leaphiorn mainly observe, albeit in the form of investigation and never meeting the two men. The apparent political machinations of the nameless and faceless congressmen are so much in the background that the story never actually tells about them.
Hillerman does maintain the narrative tension almost to the end of the book, when the text turns into an infodump. This makes the whole book look like a sideshow of getting Chee more romantically involved with Bernadette, up to and including the hurried marriage proposal.
