The Shape Shifter is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the eighteenth in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, first published in 2006.
[2] A cold case from Lt. Leaphorn's earliest days as a police officer finds new evidence, which he pursues though he is retired.
The slick and cruel perpetrator continues his same modus operandi, but Leaphorn gets evidence on this elusive murderer and thief, leading to a dangerous final encounter.
While Jim Chee and Bernadette Manuelito honeymoon in Hawaii, Mel Bork sends Leaphorn a page from a glossy magazine, showing the interior of a fine home.
Leaphorn recalls how he was diverted from aiding Grandma Peshlakai, whose entire collection of pinyon sap for making baskets had been stolen from her, and her granddaughter saw the car driving away with it.
Garcia, who tells him the story of Ray Shewnack and his burglary of Handy's gas station and grocery back in 1961.
His notion now is that the stolen pinyon sap, so common in the area, was used as the fire accelerant at Totter's place, not considered as such by the investigators.
After that cell phone call, Leaphorn sees Tommy Vang searching his pick-up truck, holding the sack of food.
As they drive, Rostic's friend calls Leaphorn to say that Totter was not in the hospital nor buried in a VA cemetery, which means he is not dead.
This novel continues directly after Skeleton Man, in that the engaged couple, Chee and Manuelito, are now married and just back from their honeymoon.
He continues to miss his late wife Emma, who died between Skinwalkers and A Thief of Time, the seventh and eight novels in the series.
Tommy Vang was born in that era, part of the Hmong displaced to Vietnam, who left as a child with Perkins / Delos after the Fall of Saigon in 1975.
Dulce, New Mexico is a stopping point near Delonie's home and where he is left in the clinic, part of the Jicarilla Apache reservation.
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 73 geographical locations, real and fictional, mentioned in The Shape Shifter.
[3] Marilyn Stasio, writing in The New York Times, finds that "Like all the great storytellers, from Homer on down, Tony Hillerman knows that every dark and twisted tale of murder can be traced back to its mythic origins.
... Hillerman’s lyrical novel is as much about recovering these lost legends — and the existential purpose they offer an aging hero in recoil from “the retirement world” — as it is about bringing a criminal to justice.
So there's real poignancy in Leaphorn's efforts to track down an antique rug woven to commemorate “all the dying, humiliation and misery” on the Navajo nation's “Long Walk” home from an Army concentration camp in the 1860s.
"[4] Irene Wanner, writing in the Los Angeles Times, says "The central image of changing identity -- of shifting shapes -- .
She feels this story will be "another of his [Hillerman's] books likely to cross over from the mystery genre to find wide general popularity.
"[5] Kirkus Reviews says there is not much mystery in this novel but Hillerman's warmth is undiminished, and notes that Jim Chee and his wife Bernadette Manuelito are present but in the background.
[6] Publishers Weekly finds the conclusion is sure to startle readers of this acclaimed mystery series, in contrast to what Kirkus Reviews finds, and that the author has "masterfully connect[ed] such disparate elements as an ancient cursed weaving, two stolen buckets of piñon sap and the Vietnam War" in this hunt for a soulless killer.