THE BLESSING WAY

When Lt. Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police discovers a corpse with a mouth full of sand at a crime scene seemingly without tracks or clues, he is ready to suspect a supernatural killer. And what he must stalk is the Wolf-Witch along a chilling trail between mysticism and murder.

DANCE HALL OF THE DEAD

A Zuni Indian boy dies in a bizzare ritual slaying - and his best friend, a Navajo youth, is missing. Navajo police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn must track the suspected killer across the desert of New Mexico and Arizona-from Zuni village to Navajo hogan.

LISTENING WOMAN

The state police and FBI are baffled when an old man and a teenaged girl are brutally murdered. The blind Navajo Listening Woman speaks of ghosts and witches. But Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn knows his people and begins an investigation that leads to the most violent confrontation of his career.

PEOPLE OF DARKNESS

Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police must use all of his powers of deduction and insight to extricate himself from a dangerous web consisting of a mysterious millionaire, a sinister, peyote-eating Indian cult and murder.

THE DARK WIND

A corpse whose palms and soles have been "scalped," an airplane's mysterious crash in the nighttime desert, and a vanishing shipment of cocaine are among the disturbing clues that send Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police into the deadly web of a cunningly-spun plot driven by Navajo sorcery and white man's greed.

THE GHOSTWAY

Officer Jim Chee discovers an Indian hogan infected by a corpse, a ghost kept from the underworld, and an odyssey of murder and revenge.

SKINWALKERS

Three shotgun blasts explode into the trailer of Officer Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police. But Chee survives to join partner Lt. Joe Leaphorn in a frightening investigation that takes them into a dark world of ritual, witchcraft, and blood - all tied to the elusive and evil "skinwalker.

A THIEF OF TIME

When two corpses appear amid stolen goods and bones at an ancient burial site, Navajo Tribal Policemen Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee must plunge into the past to unearth the astonishing truth behind a mystifying series of horrific murders.

TALKING GOD

A grave robber and a corpse reunite Navajo Tribal Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee. As Leaphorn seeks the identity of a murder victim, Chee is arresting Smithsonian conservator Henry Highhawk for ransacking the sacred bones of his anscestors. As the layers of each case are peeled away, it becomes shockingly clear that they are connected, that there are mysterious others pursuing Highhawk, and that Leaphorn and Chee have entered into the dangerous arena of superstition, ancient ceremony, and living gods.

COYOTE WAITS

When Navajo Tribal Policeman Delbert Nez is murdered, Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee begin an investigation that unravels a complex plot involving an historical find, a lost fortune, and the mythical Coyote, who is always waiting - and always hungry.

SACRED CLOWNS

Investigating the bludgeoning murder of a reservation schoolteacher and a dancing koshare clown, Navajo officer Jim Chee and Lieutenant Leaphorn of the Tribal Police attempt to decipher the sacred clown's dancing message.

FALLEN MAN

Sprawled on the ledge under the peak of Ship Rock mountain for 11 years lies an unknown body, now only bones. At Canyon de Chelly, three hundred miles across the Navajo reservation, a sniper shoots an old canyon guide who had always walked that pollen path in peace. At his home in Window Rock, Joe Leaphorn, newly retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, connects skeleton and sniper and remembers an old puzzle he could never solve. At his office in Shiprock, Acting Lt. Jim Chee is too busy to take much interest in the case until it hits too close to home.

THE FIRST EAGLE

When Acting Lt. Jim Chee catches a Hopi poacher huddled over a butchered Navajo Tribal police officer, he has an open-and-shut case - until his former boss, Joe Leaphorn, blows it wide open. Now retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, Leaphorn has been hired to find a hot-headed female biologist hunting for the key to a virulent plague lurking in the Southwest. The scientist disappeared from the same area the same day the Navajo cop was murdered. Is she a suspect or another victim? And what about a report that a skinwalker - a Navajo witch - was seen at the same time and place too? For Leaphorn and Chee, the answers lie buried in a complicated knot of superstition and science, in a place where the worlds of native peoples and outside forces converge and collide.

HUNTING BADGER

In 1998 three heavily armed "survivalists" came out of the Four Corners canyons in a stolen truck. They murdered a policeman, had a shootout with pursuers, and then vanished - eluding a manhunt that eventually involved hundreds of officers from more than twenty federal and state agencies. The crime and the bungled FBI investigation left behind a web of mysteries: Why did one of the bandits kill himself? How did the others escape? Why has no one in this impoverished area claimed the huge reward the government still offers? Most puzzling of all, what crime were they en route to commit when Officer Dale Claxton stopped them - and paid for his bravery with his life? The time is now, and the memory of the mishandled manhunt of 1998 is still painfully fresh. Three men stage a predawn raid on the Ute tribe's gambling casino. They kill one policeman, wound another, and disappear in the maze of canyons on the Utah-Arizona border. The FBI takes over the investigation, and agents swarm in with their helicopters, their high-tech equipment, and a theory of the crime that makes a wounded deputy sheriff a suspect. This development calls Chee in from his vacation, and a request for a favor draws in Leaphorn. Chee finds a fatal flaw in the federal theory, and Leaphorn sees an intriguing pattern connecting this crime with the exploits of a legendary Ute hero-bandit.

THE WAILING WIND

To Officer Bernadette Manuelito, the man curled up on the truck seat was just another drunk, which got Bernie in trouble for mishandling a crime scene, which got Sergeant Jim Chee in trouble with the FBI, which drew Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn out of retirement and back into the old "Golden Calf" homicide, a case he had hoped to forget." "Nothing has seemed complicated about that earlier one: A con game had gone sour. A swindler had tried to sell wealthy old Wiley Denton the location of one of the West's multitude of legendary lost gold mines. Denton had shot the swindler, called the police, confessed the homicide, and done his short prison time. No mystery there." "Except why did the rich man's bride vanish? The cynics said she was part of the swindle plot. She'd fled when it failed. But, alas, old Joe Leaphorn was a romantic. He believed in love, and thus the Golden Calf case still troubled him. Now, papers found in this new homicide case connect the victim to Denton and to the mythical Golden Calf Mine. The first Golden Calf victim had been there just hours before Denton killed him. And while Denton was killing him, four children trespassing among the rows of empty bunkers in the long-abandoned Wingate Ordnance Depot called in an odd report to the police. They had heard, in the wind wailing around the old buildings, what sounded like music and the cries of a woman." Bernie Manuelito uses her knowledge of Navajo country, its tribal traditions, and her friendship with a famous old medicine man to unravel the first knot of this puzzle, with Jim Chee putting aside his distaste for the FBI to help her. But the questions raised by this second Golden Calf murder aren't answered until Leaphorn solves the puzzle left by the first one and discovers what the young trespassers heard in the wailing wind

A FLY ON THE WALL

Reporter John Cotton was adept at remaining in the background. Then, his best friend was murdered, and John found his secret notebook, telling of a scandal involving a senatorial candidate. Soon John heard powerful people with something to hide.

THE GREAT TAOS BANK ROBBERY: AND OTHER INDIAN COUNTRY AFFAIRS

The author of myriad best-selling mysteries set in the American Southwest presents nine extraordinary, true tales of daily life in New Mexico, including the comical title story, about a bank holdup in Sante Fe that never was.

FINDING MOON

His predictable life changed forever by the discovery of the niece he never knew existed, Moon Mathias undertakes a dangerous journey into the war-stricken zones of Southeast Asia, where he is challenged to become the man he always wanted to be.

THE MYSTERIOUS WEST

A collection of short mysteries take place in such locales as an Arizona trailer park, the isolated Alaska bush, a narrow-minded Texas cowtown, and glitzy Las Vegas, and includes the works of J. A. Jance, Lia Matera, and other popular writers.

THE OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN DETECTIVE STORIES

Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian carpet usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe's basic formula, especially in use of language and locale. As early as 1917, Susan Glaspell evinced a poignant understanding of motive in a murder in an isolated farmhouse. And with World War I, the Roaring '20s, the rise of organized crime and corrupt police with Prohibition, and the Great Depression, American detective fiction branched out in all directions, led by writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who brought crime out of the drawing room and into the "mean streets" where it actually occurred.

THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES OF THE CENTURY (Review)

In The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, best-selling author Tony Hillerman and mystery expert Otto Penzler present an unparalleled treasury of American suspense fiction that every fan will cherish. Offering the finest examples from all reaches of the genre, this collection charts the mystery's eminent history from the turn-of-the-century puzzles of Futrelle, to the seminal pulp fiction of Hammett and Chandler, to the mystery story's rise to legitimacy in the popular mind, a trend that has benefited masterly writers like Westlake, Hunter, and Grafton. Nowhere else can readers find a more thorough, more engaging, more essential distillation of American crime fiction. Penzler, Best American Mystery Stories series editor, and Hillerman, whose Leaphorn/Chee novels have won him multiple Edgar Awards and millions of devotees, winnowed this select group out of a thousand stories, drawing on sources as diverse as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Esquire, Collier's and The New Yorker. Giants of the genre abound - Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Lawrence Block, Ellery Queen, Sara Paretsky, and others - but the editors also unearthed gems by luminaries rarely found in suspense anthologies: William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Damon Runyon, Harlan Ellison, James Thurber, and Joyce Carol Oates. Mystery buffs and newcomers alike will delight in the thrilling stories and top-notch writing of a hundred years' worth of the finest suspense, crime, and mystery writings.