The Popular Novel: The First Eagle

Set in the Four Corners, where four states and several Indian reservations meet, The First Eagle is the twelfth in a series of mystery/crime novels written by Tony Hillerman. The author has always been connected to American Indian cultures and the beauty of the Southwest. He skillfully crafts all of the beauty and ancestral tales he has heard into his colorful novels. The dialogue comes from his many years spent on the police beat as a journalist.

In The First Eagle, Lieutenant Jim Chee finds an eagle poacher by the body of a slain police officer. Meanwhile, retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn has been hired to find a missing biologist who was tracking the bubonic plague on Indian reservations. As usual in Hillerman's novels, both cases are connected.

Hillerman skillfully moves the story from one crime to the other. The reader is kept involved by the diversity between the Hopi and Navajo tribes as well as the Hopi suspect being on shared land. The natural conversations and dialogue of the main and reoccurring characters keeps the reader engaged. Chee uses a traditional hunting ritual and his skills to prove that the suspect is not guilty. Leaphorn uses some science and interviews biologists who have worked with the missing biologist, Catherine Pollard, to find her and determine why she has disappeared.

Hillerman not only brings his readers to the Southwest in The First Eagle, he makes Chee and Leaphorn human. They are never superheroes. Hillerman knows how to weave believable suspense into his stories. He never claims to be anything other than a storyteller, which he does masterfully.