The Knotted Strings

Native American tradition, New Mexico's terra-cotta landscape and a missing ``Lincoln cane'' that might have bludgeoned someone to death bring to mind Tony Hillerman's Sacred Clowns. While sharing these ingredients with that 1993 novel, Page's third Mo Bowdre mystery (after The Deadly Canyon) is angrier and more hip as it takes wicked shots at the movie business, the media, crass Eastern tourists and venal lawyers. In Santa Fe, Sweetwater Pictures is shooting a film about the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680, when a small band of Indians chased out cruel Spanish rulers. But the movie seems sabotaged: an actor is murdered, the director's car is bombed, Indian ``oppositionists'' demonstrate and a ``witching'' occurs at Santo Esteban Pueblo. Burly, blind Santa Fe sculptor Mo Bowdre joins forces with a police sergeant and a freewheeling FBI agent to effect justice. Page includes some lovely scenes--the hilltop funeral of an old pueblo leader, for example--in his suspenseful plot, but the tale's impact is diminished as he overuses the cinematic technique of cutting away from a scene just as something important is about to happen. Author tour. (Mar.)