Tony Hillerman

Until the telephone call came for him on April 12, 1975 , the world of Moon Mathias had settled into a predictable routine. He knew who he was. He was the disappointing son of Victoria Mathias, the brother of the brilliant, recently dead Ricky Mathias and a man who could be counted on to solve small problems. But the telephone caller was an airport security officer, and the news he delivered handed Moon a problem as large as Southeast Asia .

His mother, who should be in her Florida apartment, is fighting for her life in a Los Angeles hospital -- stricken while en route to the Philippines to bring home a grandchild they hadn't known existed. The papers in her purse send Moon into a world totally strange to him. They lure him down the back streets of Manila , to a rural cockfight, into the odd Filipino prison on Palawan Island and finally across the South China Sea to where Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge is turning

Cambodia

into killing fields and Communist rockets are beginning to fall on the outskirts of Saigon .

Navajo detective Lt. Joe Leaphorn must follow the bizarre trail of a shadowy killer who some say is not human.

The state police and FBI are baffled when an old man and a teenage girl are brutally murdered. The blind Navajo Listening Woman speaks of ghosts and of witches. But Lieutenant Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police knows his people as well as he knows cold-blooded killers. His incredible investigation carries him from a dead man's secret to a kidnap scheme, to a conspiracy that stretches back more than one hundred years. Leaphorn arrives at the threshold of a solution--and is greeted with the most violent confrontation of his career.

A corpse whose palms and soles have been "scalped" is only the first in a series of disturbing clues: an airplane's mysterious crash in the nighttime desert, a bizarre attack on a windmill, a vanishing shipment of cocaine. Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police is trapped in the deadly web of a cunningly spun plot driven by Navajo sorcery and white man's greed.

Navajo Tribal Police Officer Jim Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn investigate murders that lead them into spine-tingling and mystical world of Navajo witchcraft.

Three unsolved homicides and an attempt on Chee's life have left the Navajo Tribal Police baffled. Are the murders somehow connected, although they occurred 120 miles apart? Or are they random acts of violence? Chee and Leaphorn's efforts to solve the seemingly unrelated individual crimes leave them with clues that point toward one suspect, in this suspenseful mystery.

Ashie Pinto, a poor Navajo shaman, is charged with the murder of Delbert Nez, Jim Chees best friend and in Apache County sheriff. Janet Pete, attorney for the Navajo tribe's legal aid office, is his counsel, a job made especially difficult by Pinto's refusal to talk. Jim Chee is a key prosecution witness since he arrested Pinto near Nez's burning car while Nez lay inside. Lt. Joe Leaphorn observes the trial at the request of the defendant's family, and is troubled by the number of unanswered and disturbing questions that arise during the hearing. Chee is also goadcd into invcstigative action when Janet Pete feels that lie might not be doing all that he could because the victim was his friend.

Navajo Detective Jim Chee, working now for Lt. Joe Leaphorn's two-man Special Investigations Office, has followed Delmar Kanitewa, a runaway student who may know something about the murder of shop- teacher Eric Dorsey, to the Tano Pueblo for a ceremony of koshares, sacred clowns, only to see it interrupted by a second murder. The boy, who's exonerated by Chee's own eyes, has vanished again, leaving the mystery of how the two murders are connected--and (since this is one of Hillerman's most intricately plotted stories) of just how to interpret the eventual linkup: a copy of the Lincoln Cane, a century- old tribal gift, that Dorsey had made. There's also time for the reopening of an unsolved hit-and-run and for accusations that Horse Mesa Councilman Jimmy Chester is taking bribes to legalize a toxic- waste dump inside a reservation mine.

Mystery of the highest order, if you'll pardon the pun, occurs when a skeleton is discovered 1,700 feet above the base of a sacred mountain in an Indian reservation that stretches across New Mexico and Arizona . Joe Leaphorn, the detective who comes out of retirement to investigate the case, doesn't believe an Indian would climb the sacred mountain, let alone kill on it. But if someone is ruthless enough to kill, would they not be uncaring enough to do so anywhere? Perhaps, but there's issues of mining rights, land claims and money to muddle the picture in this mystery of the wide-open West.

Three armed men raid the Ute tribe's gambling casino, and then disappear in the maze of canyons on the Utah-Arizona border. The FBI takes over the investigation, and agents swarm in with helicopters and high-tech equipment. Making an explosive situation even hotter, these experts devise a theory of the crime that makes a wounded deputy sheriff a suspect--a development that brings in Tribal Police Sergeant Jim Chee and his longtime colleague, retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn to help.

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. Balancing politics, outsiders, and missing armed fugitives, Leaphorn and Chee soon find themselves caught in the most perplexing crime hunt of their lives....

The return of Leaphorn and Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police in Four Corners Country is cause for rejoicing. Sergeant Jim Chee lures his old boss, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, out of retirement with news of a murder that reaches back to an unsolved mystery that has long haunted both Chee and Leaphorn. Officer Bernadette Manuslito, a Tribal Police rookie and one of the most satisfyingly human woman cops in current fiction, discovers a body in a parked car. Manuslito is traditional Navajo and fears contamination from the spirit lingering near the corpse. She leaves the crime scene unprocessed and is criticized for mishandling evidence, leaving her boss and romantic interest Chee to cover her tracks. A document found later on the body is the link to Leaphorn and Chee's old case, which involves a murder and a disappearance tied to a legendary lost gold mine.

When the body of an undercover agent, who's been looking for clues to the whereabouts of billions of dollars missing from the Tribal Trust Funds, turns up on reservation property near Four Corners , Navajo cop Sgt. Jim Chee and Cowboy Dashee, a Hopi with the Federal Bureau of Land Management, investigate. But the book's real star is officer Bernadette "Bernie" Manuelito, Chee's erstwhile romantic interest, now working in the New Mexico boot heel for the U.S. Border Patrol. The miles have only strengthened her feelings for Chee-and vice versa. A routine patrol puts Bernie on the trail of an operation involving some old oil pipelines that connects to the Four Corners murder. Meanwhile, Joe Leaphorn is checking into the same murder from another direction. The three lines converge on a conspiracy of drugs, greed and power, and those who most profit, including the "sinister pig" of the title, will stop at nothing to keep it a secret.

Since his retirement from the Navajo Tribal Police, Joe Leaphorn has occasionally been enticed to return to work by former colleagues who seek his help when they need to solve a particularly puzzling crime. They ask because Leaphorn, aided by officers Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito, always delivers.