The First Eagle

Detecting a cop killer and missing biologist in the desert Southwest

The elusive deserts of the Southwest offer a fitting back drop for Tony Hillerman’s latest murder mystery, as it takes place in an area few readers have probably visited — the backcountry of a Navajo reservation. Faithful Hillerman fans will recognize Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn as they join forces, once again, to solve what at first seems to be an open-and-shut case: the murder of a Navajo Tribal officer by a Hopi eagle poacher.

But you don’t have to have read the author’s library of past novels to understand the premise for The First Eagle. I found Hillerman’s style friendly and inviting, like that of a party host among friends new and old. He quickly surmised background information sporadically through the book for newcomers, like me, and yet he managed to keep up the pace for those familiar with the history. That’s an important fact to keep in mind as the first chapter of the book left me a little befuddled and confused upon first read. But, I worked through that short, but rather important chapter as I discovered much later in the book — after all, it is a mystery.

The real mystery begins in the second chapter when Acting Lt. Jim Chee follows a call for back up by a fellow Navajo Tribal officer in Yells Back Butte. The officer is supposedly on his routine patrol for Hopi Indian eagle poachers — a federal offense even though eagles are important to ancient Hopi religious tradition. When Chee arrives at the remote location where his patrolman’s choppy radio transmission hailed from, he hears a struggle in the distance. As he approaches with his gun drawn, he finds his officer face down in the ground bleeding and near death. Beside the officer is a Hopi Indian with a caged eagle bending over the downed man. Suspecting immediately that the Hopi was responsible for the attack on the officer, Chee arrests the Hopi on suspicion of murder.

In the meantime, a rich family hoping to discover the whereabouts of a missing daughter calls in Chee’s former lieutenant, now retired and working as a private investigator, Joe Leaphorn. The missing woman is a biologist whose ambition it is to find the key to a virulent plague lurking in the Southwest, particularly affecting native people on the reservations. She goes missing the same day Chee’s Navajo cop is killed. The separate investigations reunite the old co-workers as they work to discover whether the woman’s disappearance is linked to the Navajo officer’s death.

One of my favorite aspects of the book was the imagery of the Navajo backcountry. Hillerman offers vivid descriptions of places like Yells Back Butte and Black Mesa, areas I’ve never seen in person, but through Hillerman’s depictions, I have clear pictures of these places in my head. Also, Hillerman weaves in the mystique of the Native American culture — superstitions like Navajo witches and traditions like Hopi eagle poachers — juxtaposed against science and modern society, adding several other dimensions to the murder mystery laid before us.

But like every good mystery, the seemingly complicated plot starts to come together in classic tradition, peeling away the layers of mystery to reveal the truth. Despite the plot’s detail, the book is an easy read and the ending somewhat predictable a few scenes before the end. But there are nice twists a long the way the keep you thinking and guessing most of the way through the book.

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