Mystery of the month

Our Tip of the Ice Pick Award for May goes to C.J. Box for Winterkill (Putnam, $23.95, 400 pages, ISBN 0399150455), his third installment in the series featuring Game Warden Joe Pickett. In the snowbound Wyoming mountains, four days before Christmas, Pickett is on patrol. Shots ring out. The limit for hunters is one elk per season, and now one shooter with a high-powered rifle has killed or mortally wounded seven animals in the space of seconds. When Pickett apprehends the man, he is shocked to discover that the perpetrator is the District Supervisor of the National Forest. Dazed and apparently drunk or confused, the man bolts into the forest. When Pickett finally catches up with him, the man is dead—murdered and pinned to a tree with a cluster of high-impact arrows, like those from a crossbow. Lest there be any doubt about the pacing of a C.J. Box novel, let it be said that the above-mentioned scene takes place within the first chapter, and the velocity doesn't slow appreciably until the last page. Folks familiar with the massacres at Waco and Ruby Ridge will find eerie parallels in Winterkill, and it is extremely difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys without a cheat sheet. And through it all, Joe Pickett must tread the fine line between administering the law and dispensing justice in this disquieting tale of the new Old West.

Hillerman mixes mystery and—yes—romance

REVIEWS BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Renowned Navajo tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn (retired but by no means out of the loop) and Jim Chee return in Tony Hillerman's latest, The Sinister Pig. The aforementioned pig is not of the porcine variety, but rather a device used for cleaning gas pipelines from the inside, a small mechanized entity capable of determining the condition of underground pipe without the messy and expensive chore of digging it up. The bad guys in The Sinister Pig have developed an ingenious use for a section of long dormant pipeline adjacent to the Mexico-U.S. border. It seems the diameter of the pipe is suitable for the transportation of all manner of contraband, easily smuggled via mechanical pig across the border right under the eyes (and feet) of the Border Patrol. When a veteran oil field troubleshooter is found murdered, Sgt. Jim Chee is called in to assist the FBI in their investigation. Chee's love interest, Border Patrol officer Bernadette Manuelito, offers up a strong supporting performance, investigating a remote outpost which may be peripherally related to Chee's case. Thrown together repeatedly by the whims of the Navajo gods, Chee and Manuelito dance around the issue of their undeniable attraction to one another; neither wants to be the first to admit what everyone around them (the reader included) has known for some time now. Although there is a liberal dose of Navajo folklore and customs, The Sinister Pig is by any measure a straight-up stand-alone suspense novel geared to appeal both to Hillerman's legions of existing fans and new readers alike.


Looking out for No. 1

Halfway across the planet in the African nation of Botswana, Mma Precious Ramotswe conducts a very different sort of sleuthing. The Kalahari Typing School for Men marks the fourth installment in Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, which has taken the mystery world by storm. Mma Ramotswe, operating from a small office in back of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, her boyfriend's auto repair shop, must confront a new sort of problem: a competing detective agency run by a man. And not just any man, but Cephas Buthulezi, an arrogant and sexist fellow, more than a little dismissive of the detecting abilities of a mere woman. It doesn't help that her new competitor, The Satisfaction Guaranteed Detective Agency, is based in a high-tech (for Botswana), attractive downtown location. Meanwhile, Ramotswe's assistant, Grace Makutsi, is growing older without a man, a situation that causes her much consternation. She decides to open a typing school for men, a dual purpose endeavor that should earn her a bit of extra money, and perhaps broaden her horizons vis-ý-vis the male population of Botswana. The travails of Ramotswe and Makutsi as they pursue their sometimes divergent goals make for some very entertaining reading, both riotously humorous and quietly profound.

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