Taking flight: Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito return in 'Lost Birds'

Loss is a dominant theme of Anne Hillerman’s satisfying ninth and latest mystery, “Lost Birds.”

However, the novel also marks the welcome return to the spotlight of the character of Joe Leaphorn — private investigator and retired Navajo Police detective.

“When I started the series, Leaphorn wasn’t feeling well. He’s slowly working his way back,” Hillerman said in a phone interview. “A lot of readers contacted me. They said, ‘We miss Leaphorn. Is he retired for good?’ ”

Taking flight: Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito return in 'Lost Birds'

The answer is a resounding “no.”

“I’ve missed him, too,” Hillerman acknowledged.

She said it’s been fun bringing Leaphorn back to the popular series.

He shares front cover billing with Navajo cops Jim Chee and Bernadette Manuelito.

But it is Leaphorn who has the leading role in two of the new book’s major mystery threads. The book’s title is named “Lost Birds,” which Leaphorn says refers to the Navajo children who had been adopted “outside the Diné world and grown up without their relatives.”

In 1978 a federal law gave tribal governments exclusive jurisdiction over Native children in adoptions, custody and foster care cases, ruling that these children should grow up in their Indigenous culture, even if the biological parents were not around.

In “Lost Birds,” Leaphorn is hired by a woman named Stella Brown who was adopted and raised by an Anglo couple, now deceased. Stella believes she may be Navajo. Her only clue to that ancestry is a photograph she has of a baby with a classic Navajo child’s blanket, taken at the reservation’s Elephant Feet sandstone butte.

Leaphorn questions the legitimacy of Stella’s adoption papers.

Meanwhile, he brings Stella to meet Janey Singer, a member of a family of Navajo weavers, so Stella can perhaps learn more about her biological parents.

Singer recalls a weaver in her family named Starla who, when she was pregnant, had disappeared. Could Stella be Starla’s child?

Leaphorn also introduces Stella to John Hawkman, owner of a trading post. Hawkman tells Stella in a tender, heartfelt conversation that he thinks they are related. “Your mother was my sister, Clarita Hawkman. … Stella, I’m so sorry I never met you. We have a lot to talk about,” he tells her. Stella finds a degree of reconciliation.

It is one of several extended, complex mysteries woven through “Lost Birds” with characters experiencing different kinds of loss.

One long-running, complicated thread begins with an explosion at the (fictitious) Eagle Roost School on the reservation that Manuelito probes. The recently-constructed building, severely damaged in the explosion, housed music and special education classes, a garage and a custodian’s closet.

Several people are suspected of being linked to the explosion — Cecil Bowlegs, the building’s janitor who has a gambling addiction and can’t be found; his wife, Bethany Benally Bowlegs, a singer and a beloved music teacher, who has fled; and the questionable behavior of Eagle Roost school principal Charles Morgan.

An enigma wrapped around the mysterious explosion is the body of an unknown woman found in a car in the garage.

Another thread on the subject of loss is focused on Leaphorn’s housemate, Louisa Bourbonette, a longtime background character in the series.

Louisa must deal with her estranged adult son Kory, who has long been in disfavor, and with Kory’s pregnant wife. Leaphorn helps Louisa find the disappearing Kory, though he finds himself on a dangerous late-night chase for Kory, who has kidnapped his mother.

A lesser, separate mystery thread on the subject of loss is a deadly attack by feral dogs on a flock of cherished sheep belonging to an elderly Navajo woman on a ranch near Teec Nos Pos.

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Hillerman said the script for episode six of season two of the AMC series “Dark Winds,” based on her father Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito novels, was nominated for an Edgar Award.