Spider Woman's Daughter

A Leaphorn & Chee Novel

By: Anne Hillerman

Narrated by: Christina Delaine

Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

Anne Hillerman, the talented daughter of best-selling author Tony Hillerman, continues his popular Leaphorn and Chee series with Spider Woman's Daughter, a Navajo Country mystery, filled with captivating lore, startling suspense, bold new characters, vivid color, and rich Southwestern atmosphere.

Navajo Nation Police Officer Bernadette Manualito witnesses the cold-blooded shooting of someone very close to her. With the victim fighting for his life, the entire squad and the local FBI office are hell-bent on catching the gunman. Bernie, too, wants in on the investigation, despite regulations forbidding eyewitness involvement. But that doesn't mean she's going to sit idly by, especially when her husband, Sergeant Jim Chee, is in charge of finding the shooter.

Bernie and Chee discover that a cold case involving his former boss and partner, retired Inspector Joe Leaphorn, may hold the key. Digging into the old investigation, husband and wife find themselves inching closer to the truth...and closer to a killer determined to prevent justice from taking its course.

©2013 Anne Hillerman (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers

The interrelationship between the four main characters.

Nothing, I enjoyed the whole audio book, as well as the Narrator. Love the Hillerman Books.

Not as good as Tony Holler and books

Very slow moving and didn't like the narrator's portrayal of speech patterns. Plot was boring.

Narrator was weak on dialects.

I would have enjoyed this more had I read the book ins taped of listening to the audio. The narrator did not sound like a Navajo person but rather more like a French-Canadian with the pronunciation of letter N's and R's.

The story was interesting but did not hold my intense interest as did the earlier Hillerman stories.

Terrible narration

This is sad. Anne Hillerman has done a fairly good job keeping the Tony Hillerman characters consistent, and the stories are OK. However Christina Delaine's narration is excruciating. She makes the characters sound demented by painfully slow speech and odd pronounciation (especially by the indian characters - is this some sort of racist commentary?!).

I very rarely object to a narration - some are better than others but most are at least tolerable. This one is not. I think that Anne Hillerman deserves a better narrator, if only for keeping the Hillerman characters alive.

This is a great book!!

Anne is continuing the tradition of her father's writings with great skill and adding her touch to them. We really enjoyed this.

Like father, like daughter.

Christina's a talented writer like her father. Good plot - it kept me guessing until the last few chapters. If you like Tony Hiller man's novels, you'll love this. The reader was great - the way she gave each character a voice was wonderful.

Spider Woman's Daughter

This book is a nice return of the characters and interesting plot. Anne Hillerman did a good job.

give it a try

I'm a longtime Tony Hillerman fan. My first book by his daughter. It's not as good as the father's work, but nice to revisit the characters again. I really don't care for this narrator, mainly due to the strange way she voices the Native American voices.

An Average Story and cringy Narration

It is hard for an author to continue the stories of another author's characters. So Anne will have a tough time following the stories of her father's characters and making them her own. Many readers will feel that we have come to know them after so many decades of reading them in Tony's books. Does she do it? Kind of. You can certainly see the similarities but they often make the difference stand out that much more.

For one while it is focused on Bernadette Manuelito, who is not a new character. She is one whom readers know well and who has proven herself decisive and capable. She spends the entire book constantly questioning herself. While she always followed the 'tough woman who doesn't need a man to tell her what to do' character trope, she is overly emotional in this book. It is out of character for someone who has been very well developed over a number of books. Jim Chee is also more emotional, but it isn't as out of character for the newly weds they are. How he expresses it is though. The story is very similar in pacing to Tony's, but without the true mastery of a mystery but that takes time to develop. The story as a whole is ho hum, there is lots of focus on characters though.

The narration is not great. Again if you had listened to the previous books narrated by George Guidall and then Christian Baskous a new narrator is hard to adjust to. I'm sure like Anne she will grow into the characters and find their voices, at least I hope so. Currently all the Native Americans have an accent that bounces between the stereotypical Native and a Chico. More so they all sound like that, the young, the old, the kids. There is not a real distinction in characters voices. Like another reviewer said it could be seen as border line offensive, especially out of context.

Anne has a hard path to follow, but one she chose. I hope the stories and the narration improve and I'm willing try the next book to see if it does. Time will tell and I wish Anne luck.

I loved this story

Thanks for keeping Leaphorn around. Some really good detective work by Jim Chee and his wife.