Sacred Clowns is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the eleventh in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, first published in 1993.
Delmar Kanitewa slips out of his boarding school in Crownpoint, and his grandmother pushes the Navajo Tribal Police to find the boy.
Janet Pete, Cowboy Dashee and Ashton Davis meet up at the Tano ceremonial of kachinas and koshares, where Chee spots Delmar.
A hit and run driver leaves his victim to die on the road, making a homicide of Victor Todachene’s death.
He finds one when a second search of Dorsey’s workshop and a visit with Sayesva’s brother reveal the story of the Lincoln cane possessed by the Tano Pueblo since 1863.
Chee is distracted completely by the change in his relationship with Janet Pete, local lawyer and long time friend.
The tape is of a phone call between Navajo Councilman Jimmy Chester and Ed Zeck, lawyer for the firm seeking to use an old open mine for a toxic waste dump site.
The two search Dorsey’s office one more time, noticing that the sketch for the first replica cane is written on the blank side of a flyer from two years earlier, prepared by an environmental group led by Roger Applebee.
Applebee needed someone reliable to get the first cane sold privately two years earlier, and that must be his friend Ashton Davis, a trusted dealer in Indian artifacts.
She meets young Ernie, and watches Chee give him a new bumper sticker to put on his grandfather’s truck, with a message to take the old one off, or the police might stop him.
Applebee played the tape of the phone call to ruin the Councilman, as he took the other side in the dispute about the toxic waste dump.
In his 2011 book Tony Hillerman's Navajoland: Hideouts, Haunts, and Havens in the Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee Mysteries, author Laurance D. Linford has listed the following 67 geographical locations, real and fictional, mentioned in Sacred Clowns.
[4] He was ready to write another book sooner, but personal situations intervened: his brother died, then Tony Hillerman got cancer, both of which slowed him down.
He is writing across a particularly troubled ethnic divide, the one separating Anglos from Indians, and no matter how he demurs, his novels have the cautiousness of anthropology, the decorousness that comes when you don't want to presume too much upon an acquaintance.
[5]The Gainesville Sun finds the story captivating: But what is captivating about this story is the thrill of the chase and more the clarity of the scenes, the reflectiveness of the characters, and most of all, the way Chee succeeds in resolving a conflict between Navajo values and those of the surrounding society without weighting the plot unduly or battering the reader with invidious comparisons.
[6]Kirkus Reviews finds this intricately plotted and a masterful novel in its own right: Navajo Detective Jim Chee, working now for Lt. Joe Leaphorn's two-man Special Investigations Office, has followed Delmar Kanitewa, a runaway student who may know something about the murder of shop-teacher Eric Dorsey, to the Tano Pueblo for a ceremony of koshares, sacred clowns, only to see it interrupted by a second murder.
The boy, who's exonerated by Chee's own eyes, has vanished again, leaving the mystery of how the two murders are connected--and (since this is one of Hillerman's most intricately plotted stories) of just how to interpret the eventual linkup: a copy of the Lincoln Cane, a century-old tribal gift, that Dorsey had made.
There's also time for the reopening of an unsolved hit-and-run and for accusations that Horse Mesa Councilman Jimmy Chester is taking bribes to legalize a toxic-waste dump inside a reservation mine.
He has been writing his Navajo thrillers for over 20 years, and each time I pick up a new Hillerman book I wonder if this is the one that will disappoint, lower the standard, signal the beginning of the end.
Sacred Clowns is as good as anything he's done-as flavorful and chewy as beef jerky, so evocative of the land around the Four Corners area of New Mexico that even if you've never been there you'll think you have.
[8]Publishers Weekly finds the plot is resolved with gratifying inevitability: Telling his story the Navajo way, Hillerman (Coyote Waits) fully develops the background of the cases pursued by Navajo Tribal Policemen, Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee, so that the resolutions--personal and professional--ring true with gratifying inevitability.
Leaphorn searches for clues while simultaneously grieving for his wife who died 18 months earlier and considering his relationship with linguistics professor Louisa Bourebonette.
Jurisdictional conflicts with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Apache County Sheriff's Office reflect the cultural differences that obtain among tribes and clans as this first Leaphorn story in three years, steeped in Navajo lore and traditions, draws to its convincing conclusions.