Iain’s Reviews > People of Darkness > Status Update

Starting to pick up some momentum and get interesting on a character level.

This is heading into unsettling hitman with mommy issues and incongruous habits territory... which probably felt fresh in 1980, but the lingering introduction to the villain here is leaving me worried we're heading into boring cliché territory. I wonder how much this is going to be a problem with any popular crime fiction from past decades, that we've just been exposed to too much crime procedure since then.

I'm enjoying meeting Chee. What Hillerman himself said about him led me to expect he might annoy and frustrate me, but so far he seems nearly as appealing as Leaphorn, just younger and less aware of the outside world.

Did this break the convention of the first chapter personally introducing someone doomed? It had the usual setup of presenting the crime to kick things off, but it seems like we only saw the victim from afar.