Praise for Classical Villainy: A Four Corners Mystery...
...from the Santa Fe New Mexican, September, 2002
Colorado writer stakes out his own mystery territory
Southwestern mystery writers have made a lemming-like break for the territory Tony Hillerman first claimed as he meticulously opened the world of the Diné through the voices of Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. A plethora of mysteries have been published with varying degrees of sensitivity to American Indian tradition, which while not canned, might contain MSG—mighty similar glad-handing—the more bits and pieces of extraneous lore, the better.
HP Hanson’s Four Corners mysteries are a refreshing exception to this trend. The second and most recent in this series, Classical Villainy, is a well-developed story set at a fictional college, Frémont State University, in slightly modified Durango, Colo.
Hanson clearly draws on his 16 years at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he managed a large environmental-science institute, to provide detail for the vagaries of university politics.
In Classical Villainy, the pair who teamed up unexpectedly in Hanson’s first mystery, The Dean’s Murders (2000), Hal Weathers, a dean of Frémont State University, and Annette Trieri, head of the Investigations Unit of the Durango Police Department, continue to unravel clues while knitting a closer relationship with each other. The crime is dastardly—a young woman found dead across the tracks of the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad—and the story-telling a scientist’s deliberate building of evidence.
With a well-constructed plot that is dialogue-driven, Hanson’s sidetracks into fly-fishing lore or monsoon etiology are a pleasure to follow. The foray into Santa Fe at the end f the book is the City Different seen differently, not deferentially.
Even as a plot device in a mystery, sanctioned pillaging of prehistoric sites to make black-market fortunes is a chilling reminder that pirates no longer need to sail. And perhaps Hanson has rightly seen that the next unexplored territory in Southwestern mysteries might be the unfathomable peculiarities of the Anglo.
...and from Writer's Digest
Beginning with a most interesting prologue describing the interment of an ancient AmerIndian Basketmaker, whose grave goods form a vital element of the plot, this is a fine mystery, gripping from beginning to end. The author has, in his detective Annette Trieri, the potential for creating a solid series, somewhat on the order of J.A. Jance’s Joanna Brady novels. Trieri has a combination of bulldog tenacity and toughness, together with a certain vulnerability, that the reader finds involving.
The writing is excellent. Hanson doesn’t put a foot wrong as he works his fascinating cast of unusual characters through a complex plot, and he ends the book with a climax to equal almost any I have read. This book is a nine on a scale of ten.