SOURCE: Champlin, Charles. “Wisdom Lends Justice a Hand.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (3 October 1993): 12.

In the following review, Champlin argues that although Sacred Clowns is not the most dramatic in the Leaphorn/Chee series, the book is “one of the warmest and most pleasing of Hillerman's novels.”

With The Blessing Way in 1970, Tony Hillerman staked an invincible claim on the Native American Southwest as a unique and fertile ground for mysteries. Hillerman's evocations of the austere beauty of the Four Corners country where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona come together have the force of poetry. His recordings of the place names and clans of the reservation country create a kind of litany: Coyote Wash and Standing Rock, Chivato Mesa and the Turquoise Mountain, the Bitter Water Dinee' and the Streams Come Together People.

The Blessing Way introduced Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police, by now a...