SOURCE: Bain, David Haward. “Drums along the Mekong.” New York Times Book Review (22 October 1995): 12.

In the following review, Bain praises Hillerman for using well-developed characters and exercising narrative control in Finding Moon.

Tony Hillerman, Western writer of fiction and nonfiction, author of the best-selling Navajo mysteries featuring the tribal police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, strikes out into dramatically new terrain with Finding Moon. It is Southeast Asia, circa 1975, and, as the client governments in Saigon and Phnom Penh fall before the Communist onslaught, a place of great peril and deep mystery.

The hero is Malcolm (Moon) Mathias (the nickname comes from his childhood affection for Moon Pies). He is a barrel-chested former Army sergeant, now deeply rutted in a job at a Colorado newspaper, editing wire-service dispatches, smoothing out press releases and passing along boring local news. His girlfriend is 20 years younger and emotionally undependable; he...