: Skeleton Man
Author: Tony Hillerman
This was a very strange book. Nothing much happens and the plot is told so many times I was sick to death of it halfway through. You see, there was this plane crash over the Grand Canyon like 50 years ago. A man with a briefcase of diamonds was on the plane. Now one of those diamonds has surfaced. A woman, who was the man’s daughter, wants to find the source of the diamonds because they might lead her to her father’s arm: if she can use DNA from the arm to prove she’s related, she’ll gain her father’s fortune which was denied her by scheming relatives who never liked her mother and refused to believe the daughter was legitimate. Now that’s a cool plot, but we first here that plot revealed by one of the characters who’s telling the story. Then we hear it from the woman’s perspective. Then we hear it like twenty more times from different character’s views. It just gets ridiculous. I was just so glad when this book ended! Of course the search for the arm/diamonds is complicated by several factors, but it’s still a straightforward plot. If we cut out all the repetitive stuff this novel would have been fifty pages long. Still, there were some interesting elements, the main one being the history and culture of the American Indians who are local to the area and some of the main characters. Unfortunately, some of that came across like the whaling data in Moby Dick: superfluous and irrelevant. While I liked the concept, the implementation was incredibly weak. I gather Hillerman’s a successful author, but I think I’ll skip his other books.
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