As he does in his other books, Hillerman both informs and entertains through Coyote Waits. An academic and popular historian himself, Hillerman deftly weaves into his tale a great deal of information about academic politics — particularly in the field of American history — and about Navajo culture and the American Southwest. Through Leaphorn and Chee, the Navajo custom of careful listening is juxtaposed with the impatience displayed by those characters whose roots are in the white man's culture; and through Leaphorn and Chee, the reader listens to Odell Redd discuss traditional historians of the West and their scholarly quarrels with the proponents of revisionist historicism.

Coyote Waits is driven by an entertaining and multistranded plot that weaves together a number of seemingly separate stories: a policeman looking for vandals, a professor determined to discover Butch Cassidy's body, a case of adolescent infatuation, and a ruthless money-making scheme...