Tony Hillerman

The car fire didn't kill Navajo Tribal Policeman Delbert Nez—a bullet did. And the old man in possession of the murder weapon is a whiskey-soaked shaman named Ashie Pinto. Officer Jim Chee is devastated by the slaying of his good friend Del, and confounded by the prime suspect's refusal to utter a single word of …

A Thief of Time is the eighth crime fiction novel Joe Leaphorn / Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series by Tony Hillerman, first published in 1988. The story involves the lure of the thousand-year-old Anasazi ruins, a missing anthropologist, a stolen backhoe, people who steal ancient pots on reservation land and human …