Skeleton Man (novel)
Skeleton Man is the seventeenth crime fiction novel in the Joe Leaphorn / Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series by Tony Hillerman, first published in 2004. It was a New York Times best-seller A spectacular crash of two planes above the Grand Canyon in the 1950s killed all aboard, and filled the Canyon with everything that had once been on the two planes. The event alters long held stories of the tribes who live on the Canyon floor, and leaves a pregnant woman about to be married on her own, when her fiancé's family rejects her  and her child. The child is grown, and seeks her father's remains, while the lawyer who gained financially by rejection of the child fights to hold on to his wealth. A couple of expensive diamonds bring Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito into her story, where greed is contested against family support in the grandeur of the canyon. Plot summary. When two passenger airplanes collide over the Grand Canyon in the 1950s killing all aboard, John Clarke's body is lost, as is the briefcase of diamonds he had locked to his wrist. Scorning Mr. Clarke's pregnant fiancée, the Clarke  family disclaims the out-of-wedlock daughter, Joanna Craig. When Clarke's father dies without heir shortly after the crash, the family fortune is entrusted to the estate's attorney, Dan Plymale, to create a charitable foundation. Mr. Plymale then proceeds to live well as executor of the foundation's funds, while Joanna Craig and her mother make their own way. Decades later, Billy Tuve, a Hopi, is arrested on suspicion of burglary and murder based on his presenting a rare diamond for pawn. Tuve's cousin, Cowboy Dashee solicits help from his friend Navajo Tribal Police Sergeant Jim Chee  to clear Tuve's name. Retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn recalls that his old acquaintance Shorty McGinnis acquired a similar diamond many years ago from a man whose story matches Tuve's story. Then Louisa Bourebonette relates the stories she has heard from older Havasupais about the man with the diamonds living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and the flyers from a woman seeking her father's remains from that plane crash, which Leaphorn shares with Chee. Joanna Craig pays the bail for Billy Tuve, asking him to lead her to the place where he received the diamond. Though  it will aid his case, Billy is reluctant because the place, the Salt Shrine, is sacred to his religion. Before Joanna can pick Billy up at his own home, Fred Sherman takes Billy away. Joanna trails them, and in a quick maneuver, takes Sherman's gun from him and shoots him in the chest. She and Billy proceed to the trail head on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Billy takes her part way down, then disappears. Bradford Chandler, hired by Dan Plymale, learns Sherman will not meet him when a police officer answers Sherman's cell phone. Chandler  goes on alone, arriving near the sacred spot. Chee, Dashee, and Bernadette Manuelito arrived earlier, looking both for the absent Billy and the man who long ago traded with Billy, a religious hermit wanting people to believe more in Massau’u, to resolve their feelings after the plane crash, with bodies raining down on them. Manuelito stays behind while Chee and Dashee each go a different way along the canyon bottom. She does not stay in one place, but walks and finds the slot (a cave but with an opening to sunlight way above) along the canyon wall where the man  had lived, and his body, long dead of natural causes. She sees a human arm bone, and his array of the 70 remaining diamonds. She finds what Chee and Dashee sought. Chandler, with his loaded pistol, meets Joanna in the canyon bottom. An uneasy pair, they follow Manuelito's tracks into the slot, where she is ready for the murderous Chandler. Chandler stores the seventy odd diamonds in his hiking socks. A "male" storm, one of high intensity rains, rises. Manuelito and Joanna Craig take shelter on a ledge, while Chandler leaves with his diamonds and is then carried out  by the force of the instant river made by the rain. Chee finds the slot in time to see the corpse carried out by the torrent of water, followed by Chandler. He tries to save Chandler, but Chandler will not let go of the socks full of diamonds. The storm passes, and Chee runs to Manuelito. The three meet Dashee, whose ankle is injured, and return in the rescue helicopter. Joanna Craig has what she needed most, the remains of her father's arm, once chained to the container of diamonds. New DNA analysis methods show positively that he was  her father, and she claims her true name of Clarke. She now has the basis to sue Plymale for her inheritance. Sherman was found in time by the local police, and survives. He will not admit that petite Joanna Craig shot him; instead he tells police he did it himself by accident. The two corpses were found, but not the diamonds, save for the one taken by Bernadette as evidence in favor of Billy Tuve. Billy Tuve is proved innocent of theft and murder. Title. Skeleton man is an alternative name for the Hopi Death kachina, Massau'u. It is also  what Chee said to describe the corpse of the shaman as it passed by him in the torrent of water from the slot that had been the shaman's home when alive. Joanna Craig sought the bones of her father, both to properly bury him and to show she was his daughter, using the DNA still present, nearly 50 years later. Continuity. In conversations among the characters, references are made to stories in earlier novels. For example, Leaphorn and Shorty McGinnis make passing mention of Tso and the singer Margaret Cigaret, who were in the novel "Listening Woman". Jim Chee  and Bernadette Manuelito were engaged to marry at the end of the prior novel, "The Sinister Pig", and they now make the final plans to marry. Chee recalls the two women he knew and loved before he fell in love with Bernadette Manuelito: Mary Landon (introduced in "People of Darkness" ) and Janet Pete (introduced in "Skinwalkers") who each pursued Chee, but would not consider living on the reservation for him. Bernadette Manuelito recalls the story told her of the way Chee handled the driver who made amends after killing a man while driving drunk, yet needed to stay out of  jail to care for his grandson, part of the plot of "Sacred Clowns". Natural, cultural and historical references. Geographic, botanical, animal, historical, and cultural artifacts and events often play key roles in the Chee/Leaphorn series - either as direct plot elements, to explain character motivations or perspectives, or to illustrate cultural or religious beliefs and practices. In "Skeleton Man" this includes: Reviews. Marilyn Stasio writing in "The New York Times" observes: But rather than solving the mystery in a conventional sense, to unravel these reworked myths reaffirms their power. In ignoring the beauty of the natural world to grasp for  diamonds, the villains of this piece only confirm ancient Indian wisdom about greed. Even Leaphorn, not a spiritual man, unconsciously absorbs the Skeleton Man's lesson about immortality when he contemplates the "empty dusty silence" of a world in which many of his old friends have died and faces his own fear of death. No wonder Hillerman's stories never grow old. Like myths, they keep evolving with the telling. "Kirkus Reviews" finds this not so much a mystery as a story of suspense as the main characters converge in the treacherous landscape of the Grand Canyon: A brain-damaged  Hopi holds the key to a fortune in diamonds, and even bigger stakes, in this treasure hunt. When he died nearly 50 years ago in a plane crash over the Grand Canyon, John Clarke had a case of diamonds chained to his left wrist and a pregnant fiancée waiting at the altar. Now, good-natured Billy Tuve has tried to pawn what looks like one of the Clarke diamonds for $20. Amid the usual jurisdictional scuffles among the Navajo Count Police, the Navajo Tribal Police, and the FBI, Billy’s placed under arrest for robbing and killing the diamond ’s latest owner, Shorty McGinnis, who turns out to be very much alive. As retired Lt. Joe Leaphorn and active Sgt. Jim Chee of the NTP ("The Sinister Pig", 2003, etc.) sort out Billy’s and Shorty’s wild tales of how they acquired the diamonds, it becomes clear that three separate parties will be converging on the floor of the Grand Canyon. Chee and his own fiancée, Bernadette Manuelito, want to confirm Billy’s story; Joanna Craig wants to find her father’s missing left arm, whose DNA can prove she’s his rightful heir; and skip tracer Bradford  Chandler, acting on behalf of John Clarke’s crooked executor Dan Plymale, wants to make sure she doesn’t. Adventures ensue. No mystery this time, but considerable suspense in the race to bottom of one of the most spectacular and treacherous landscapes Hillerman’s ever explored. "Publishers Weekly" also notes the suspense of this sterling novel: The "School Library Journal" finds this book, for high school readers and adults, to be a crackerjack addition to this series: "Bookmarks Magazine" finds this novel disappointing compared to others in the series, and not enough suspense: