Dance Hall of the Dead

 

By Tony Hillerman

A young Zuñi boy, Ernesto, is missing and his last known location drenched in blood. His best friend, a Navajo boy, George, has also gone missing, the morning after Ernesto disappeared. 

Normally, the Zuñi police would handle the investigation. But because George is not a Zuñi, Joe Leaphorn, a Navajo policeman, is called in, tasked with one thing: find George Bowlegs.

So Joe starts nosing around, following George's trail which leads him to Zuñi Village where Ernesto disappeared. And to George's home, where Joe finds the boy's father who is too drunk to be of any help. But he finds George's younger brother who is able to enlighten Joe about what George was up to in the days leading up to Ernesto's disappearance. Ernesto is soon found in a shallow grave and now young George is a suspect in his friend's death. Joe continues tracing George's movements and his contacts which included a hippy encampment and also an archaeological dig site. 

The hippies saw George the morning after Ernesto was killed and indicate that George had set out on horseback on a journey but they didn't know where. And Joe's questions at the dig site revealed that the two boys were frequent visitors there until the leader of the dig ran them off, claiming they were contaminating the dig site. 

But none of this leads Joe to a killer or a reason why a young boy was so brutally murdered. There is more to the story and an important part of it may be George's fascination with the Zuñi religion. Joe had seen a man dressed as a Zuñi kachina lurking around and the younger brother had indicated that George had also claimed to have seen and been frightened by a man dressed as a kachina. 

Did Ernesto die because he broke some rule about the Zuñi religion? Was that kachina-disguised person hunting down George for the same reason? Or did the two boys somehow cross the drug smugglers associated with the hippie camp? It soon becomes clear to Joe that someone is hunting young George and if Joe doesn't find the boy first, George will meet his death.

This was a very readable and engrossing story even though the murderer was pretty clear long before the end of the story. And the ending brings up the problem I had with the book: I hated the ending. To go all the way through a story to have it end the way it did was very disappointing.