The Joe Leaphorn Mysteries (1989)

Here are three outstanding mysteries, all featuring Navajo Tribal Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn, one of the genre's most insightful and intriguing sleuths. In The Blessing Way, a casual summer outing in the high desert to investigate rumors of Navajo sorcery leads Leaphorn and anthropologist Bergen McKee to a series of inexplicably grisly murders. In Dance Hall of the Dead, Leaphorn is assigned to track down a missing Navajo youth whose Zuni friend was found brutally murdered. With thousands of square miles of desert before him and only his keen sense of reason as a guide, Leaphorn's search unearths a deadly secret and a ruthless killer who will stop at nothing to keep it hidden. And in Listening Woman the murder of a terminally ill old man and a teenage girl on a desolate mesa has the state police and the FBI baffled. But Leaphorn's uncanny powers of deduction and his knowledge of the ways of his people lead him into a fanatical, century-old plot and the bloody heart of the mystery.