Tall Man in Ray-Bans by Joseph Flynn

A couple kids playing in a dry lake bed outside of Austin, TX unearth a skeleton. Some early clues point toward the corpse being a long time fugitive Randy Bear Heart. Randy disappeared years ago after robbing a few banks, killing a couple bank guards, and a reservation cops. This means that multiple agencies are called in.

Austin PD has first dibs, but the FBI as well as the Bureau of Indian Affairs also get called in; turf wars are on the horizon. BIA Special Agent John Tall Wolf has, how to say this, a unique way of conducting an investigation and is entirely unimpressed with the courtesies normally showed the FBI. When he was recruited, he had his own requirements, primarily independence and not being sent to a reservation. His boss wanted to know if he also wanted a license to take scalps, to wit, "That'd be a good start."

Tall Wolf has to dig back into Bear Heart's history and find out how and why he managed to disappear.  He traces Bear Heart from a North Dakota reservation to Canada, to Texas, California, and Banff uncovering a bizarre set of circumstances surrounding girlfriends, wives, a son, songwriter, and a comely Mountie (even BIA detectives are allowed a little fun).

My brother-in-law suggested this book and by good luck and timing, it was on sale for the Kindle. Having just finished that beast of a book, the 700-page I am Pilgrim, Tall Man was a veritable short story by comparison. I have missed the mysteries of the late, great Tony Hillerman and his Navaho cops Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, looking for someone to fill that void. One of the primary draws of the Hillerman books was the way he would weave Navaho culture and mysticism into the stories. Flynn makes no bone about Tall Wolf being Apache, but here Tall Wolf seems to live comfortably a bit more inside the White world of government agencies, and for that I'm disappointed. But that doesn't mean I'll quit here. This is the first of two (so far) Tall Wolf books and I will definitely be finding the next.  Highly entertaining.

East Coast Don