Shadow of the Solstice: 05/25/25

Shadow of the Solstice by Anne Hillerman and Jessica Matten (Narrator) (2025) is the 28th book in the Navajo mystery series (now called the Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito series). Chee is forced to step into a leadership role while the Navajo Nation prepares for a tour by the Energy Secretary. Meanwhile, Manuelito is investigating a sweat lodge being built without permits. All the while, a grandmother is trying to find her missing grandson who disappeared during some dubious rehab.

Put simply, there's a lot going on here. I haven't even mentioned the murder — a body found out at a toxic waste dumping site. Although the four plot threads are all related, they don't come together in as neat and tidy a way as older books do. I feel that the rehab plot is relegated to an extended coda after the Chee/Manuelito plots get going.

Some of this change in plotting might be due to a change in author. Anne has a different story telling approach than her late father. That's fine. But part of it I think stems from improved remote communication. The characters don't have to have physical ties to the different, disparate events to know of them or to even help solve them. Now there are cell phones, and their increasing reliability (including 911 to extremely remote areas) is mentioned in story.

While I miss the tight way the story threads would come together in Tony's mysteries, I don't miss how often he had elderly characters blaming witchcraft on all of the bad stuff happening around them.

Mrs. Raymond would have been a very different person if Tony had written this book. Here she is having seen the ills of drugs and alcohol in her family. While she prefers speaking Diné bizaad instead of English, she isn't looking for supernatural causes for her family's problems. She's a real and relatable grandmother character.

Of course Mrs. Raymond also brings up one of the paradoxes of this long running series. The first book came out in 1970. The series is three years old than I am. For Mrs. Raymond to be a grandmother of a high school aged boy, she's probably in her seventies. That means she would have been a young woman when the series started.

Jim Chee, who is "middle aged" in the series now, first appeared in People of Darkness (1980) and was in his mid to late twenties then. Realistically he should be closer to Mrs. Raymond's age than he's written. Mrs. Raymond's grandson would have been born in 2008, or two years after Tony's last book, The Shape Shifter.

One difference with how I read this book was I chose to listen to the audiobook narrated by Jessica Matten. Most of the original run of books I've listened to as read by George Guidall. I loved listening to her performance, especially her portrayal of Mrs. Raymond.

Four stars

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