Review: The Sacred Bridge

The Sacred Bridge by Anne Hillerman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another in the Hillerman family enterprise of Navajo nation mysteries. Daughter Anne Hillerman has taken the lead characters from her father’s time and transformed them to side characters to her detective Manuelito. I haven’t found the stories gripping, but have found them mostly entertaining. Compared to the previous book in the series, I found this one to have much more Navajo-related description, with Chee deeply involved in a personal spiritual crossroad that ends up entwined with a murder investigation with aspects of ancient history and modern tourism. Manuelito gets involved with another aspect of modern Navajo nation issues, dealing with corporate hemp growers and their interactions with traditional Navajo ways. I liked the main story lines here. However, the author added a number of side stories that detracted and distracted from the interesting bits - overlarge red herrings. I also found the beginning of the book had a number of long descriptive monologues by characters that sounded like they were quoting from Wikipedia. I realize the author needs to set the stage for the rest of the story, but the beginning was too forced and formulaic.

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