"The Dark Wind" by Tony Hillerman

"The Dark Wind" is a novel written by Tony Hillerman in 1982. This is the second novel Tony Hillerman has written based on the same characters. This book is 320 pages long and an audio recording is available, narrated by George Guidall. In 1991, the book was made into a movie directed by Errol Morris, starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Fred Ward, John Karlen, and Gary Farmer.

When the book begins, Jim Chee has just graduated from college and had taken up a job in Arizona as an officer with the Navajo Tribal Police. With the help of his superior, Joe Leaphorn, keeping peace between the Navajo and Hopi that were sharing the same territory was the main focus of the job.

Later on, Sheriff Dashee of the Hopi law enforcement group finds a body that had its palms and soles scalped and has been lying dead in the desert for some time. He believes the dead body was somehow linked to a recent robbery at the reservation's trading post. Jake West is a manager of a Hopi shop and strongly believes that a drug dealer from the Navajo group by the name of Joe Musket is responsible for the murder. Officer Chee and his superior officer Leaphorn now have to investigate a robbery, a murder, and a plane crash.

After a somewhat slow start and what seems to be a boring plot, the setting starts to pick up and the intense action becomes more intriguing. The book has all the right ingredients of murder, creed, and revenge to make a great mystery and suspense novel.