The Joe Leaphorn Mysteries: The Blessing Way / Dance Hall of the Dead / Listening Woman

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 a keen sense of reason as a guide, Leaphorn’s search unearths a deadly secrete 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 blood heart of the mystery.