Today’s Book Series by Volume adds three more cubic feet to your already stuffed bookshelves (if they aren’t over-stuffed then you need to get to work on that) with three series you should investigate.
Leaphorn and Chee by Tony Hillerman – This series of 18 books fills in about one cubic foot, though the area it covers is as large as the Navajo Nation. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police Department is a craggy, quiet, and thoughtful man who is intensely curious and logically rigorous. Officer Jim Chee holds Leaphorn in great esteem, but feels the weight of his shadow at times. Chee has a greater attachment to Navajo spirituality than the Lieutenant which, at times, causes an odd juxtaposition where the younger man espouses traditionalism versus the older man’s respectful rejection of superstition.
Throughout this series, Hillerman educates the reader in Navajo social, spiritual, and artistic culture and somehow makes the intensely hot, dusty, and rocky expanse of the Navajo Reservation a thing of beauty. For someone born and raised here in the Evergreen state of Washington as I am, that is quite the trick.
It’s worth noting that Hillerman’s daughter Anne Hillerman picked up the series after his death and has done pretty well in her three novels thus far. Also, PBS Mystery! Adapted three of his novels, Skinwalkers, A Thief of Time, and Coyote Waits in the early 2000s.
Harry Dresden by Jim Butcher – Also a series of 18 books, it too takes up about a cubic foot. Harry Dresden, on the other hand, takes up quite a bit more space than that. Tall, lean, and with a hawkish demeanor, Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden doesn’t fit any box made – few Chicago-based practicing wizards do, after all. Technically, the Dresden books are Urban Fantasy, but having a PI license and with Chicago detectives calling you in to consult on the ‘odd cases’ creates enough ambiguity to make this list, I’d say.
Keeping company with a 30-pound cat named Mister, a huge Temple Dog (described as “a cross between a chow, a woolly mammoth, and a West Highland Dogosaurus.”) that is likely smarter than he is, and Bob, an ancient ‘spirit of intellect’ who acts as kind of an encyclopedia of magic and magical things, Dresden does his best to keep the line between the mundane and magical worlds as sharp as possible. With full knowledge of his flaws and weaknesses, he is one of those characters that does what’s right, not what’s easy. While he rarely makes it out of situations unscathed, his opponents must suffer through his wit and sarcasm, as does his frequent partner from CPD Lieutenant Karrin Murphy.
This series is just plain fun to read and contains a lot of humor and great interplay between the characters.
The Retrieval Artist by Kristine Kathryn Rusch – Another cubic foot should be set aside for these 15 often overlooked books. Miles Flint, a former cop and current Retrieval Artist, isn’t quite sure about the ethics of his job. Stationed on the moon where humans and aliens have set up a loose, treaty-bound alliance, Flint is often called upon to retrieve ‘The Disappeared’, humans who have run afoul of alien law, however inadvertently, and gone on the lam.
Now that may sound mundane, but Rusch reminds us, like Stanislaw Lem did in the 60’s, that alien minds think in alien ways, so what would make sense to a human would likely be incomprehensible to an alien, and vice versa. Yeah, that ‘vice versa’ is always the problem – especially when there’s plenty of vices and way too many versas.
Cast from a hard-boiled mold, Flint walks a deft line between very alien cultures and his disillusionment with an increasingly authoritarian Earth. Rusch takes apart the ideas of justice and what is right and explores them against a backdrop of alien thinking and culture.
~posted by Jay F.
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