This is the full and detailed views of HarperPaperbacks second printing of Tony Hillerman's People of Darkness (1980), the fourth novel in Hillerman's Navajo Detective series. People of Darkness introduces Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, a younger and in some ways more traditional Navajo than Joe Leaphorn.
Cover design and illustration: Peter Thorpe. Thorpe began designing for Hillerman's novels in 1986. This design repeats elements from Thorpe's 1988 paperback cover design for Perennial, another subsidiary of Harper & Row. Thorpe's designs for Hillerman's novels are iconic: a symmetrical Southwest landscape, a central focus, and a framing device taken from Navajo culture. In this case, the horizon line and the hogan from the 1988 design are retained although redeployed: the hogan is moved to left center and is balanced by oil well rigging on the right, with the horizon line of mesas and Mt. Taylor standing superimposed in front of a night sky. The focal point and framing element are combined in this design, as Thorpe has placed an illustration of a squash blossom necklace across the top of the landscape. The necklace's squash blossom pendant has been enhanced with the addition of a black human skull amulet. Neither a squash blossom necklace nor a skull amulet figure in the novel's plotline, although fetishes made out of a mysterious black mineral do.
The cover of the first HarperPaperbacks printing of People of Darkness, also in 1991, looks exactly the same. The only differences are the additional Hillerman novels advertised on each novel, the type used for the author name and title (raised glossy metallic for this edition versus flat nonmetallic gold for the 1991 paperback edition) and the pricing.
