As someone who has been reading about Jim Chee the Navajo police officer for as long as he's been in paperback, I'm delighted that Anne Hillerman took up the job of writing her father's characters after his death. Tony Hillerman was a fantastic mystery author with great regard for the peoples and landscape of the Four Corners, and his daughter is clearly into her stride with the twenty-second book in the series.

CAVE OF BONES is found by a troubled teen girl from a tribal re-education program. Annie Rainsong was hiking out for some solitude and reflection, but got lost and ended up in a cold, scary cave in the New Mexico lava country. When she finally makes it back to camp, Domingo Cruz, the educator who had gone to look for her, is still missing. Officer Bernie Manuelito, married to Jim Chee, has come out to the camp to talk with the girls, but finds herself leading a search and rescue, as well as deciding if the bones are an ancient burial or something more recent. The Navajo respect ancestors greatly and never disturb burials.

Sergeant Chee is in Santa Fe, New Mexico, taking updated law classes with other agents. Trouble lives everywhere and he's asked to check on a few people while he's in Santa Fe. His wife's sister Darleen is studying at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Chee asking her for a friendly meal turns into more trouble: Darleen is aggrieved at her boyfriend. Said boyfriend is now hanging around with a man Chee put away for violence. Darleen doesn't take orders well, and Chee has to try to advise her gently.

The tales intertwine, a media studies project on a Navajo reservation next to a missing ranch worker and an allegation of diverted funding. The redrock country in December is bitter cold with stinging winds, blowing snow, and wildlife absent or hunkered down to survive. I like that we see retired gentleman Joe Leaphorn again, recovering from a nasty injury, passing on his store of memories about the Four Corners denizens. The two different missing men can make it a little hard to keep track of who was last seen where or related to whom; the Navajo are strong on kinships. Unusually in my reading to date of these books, we meet a gay man, who is in a relationship with one of the vanished men. Amusingly, Chee is at a seminar on finding missing kids, through Amber Alerts, and missing elders who wander off; but the missing subjects we see are mature men.

Anne Hillerman puts the emphasis on women investigators in CAVE OF BONES, a tale to delight all fans of Native culture crime stories.