Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee mysteries

The police dispatcher sends Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn to retrieve the body of a young man found alongside the road, apparently dead of an alcohol overdose. But when Leaphorn arrives, he suspects the cause of death isn't so simple: the dead man's face is set in a grimace of terror. And as the lieutenant searches for the cause, all the clues point to Navajo witchcraft.

For Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, the case begins when he finds a pair of boots in the rabbit brush beside a wilderness trail. The boots' owner lies nearby, his palms and soles "scalped" in what appears to be a witch's scavenging. The federal investigators tell Chee to mind his own business. But a series of disturbing events draws Chee into a dangerous web of intrigue spun by Navajo sorcery and white greed.

Three shotgun blasts rip through the side of Officer Jim Chee's trailer as the Navajo Tribal Policeman sleeps. He survives, but the inexplicable attack has raised disturbing questions about a lawman once beyond reproach. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn wonders why Chee was a target and what connection the assault has to a series of gruesome murders that has been plaguing the reservation. But the investigation is leading them both into a nightmare of ritual,...

Reunited by a grave robber and a corpse, Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is trying to determine the identity of a murder victim, while Officer Jim Chee is arresting Smithsonian conservator Henry Highhawk for ransacking the sacred bones of his ancestors.

But with each peeled-back layer, it becomes shockingly clear that these two cases are mysteriously connected — and that others are pusuing Highhawk, with lethal intentions.

...

Don't miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+!

First there was the trouble at Saint Boneventure boarding school. A teacher is dead, a boy is missing, and a council woman has put a lot of pressure on Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee to find her grandson. Sitting on a rooftop watching sacred clowns perform their antics in a Pueblo ceremony, Chee spots

...

New York Times best-selling author Tony Hillerman packs his flawless mysteries with evocative southwestern scenery, Native American lore, and finely-crafted characters. In The First Eagle, fear has been sweeping the Navajo reservation ever since a vicious killer and an unusually virulent strain of bubonic plague started claiming victims. When Tribal policeman Jim Chee discovers a blood-stained Hopi man hovering over a young officer's body, it looks...

Former Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn comes out of retirement to investigate a simple robbery. But soon the trail leads back 50 years, to a plane crash in the Grand Canyon that killed a man protecting a fortune in diamonds.