The Sinister Pig (Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee Series #16) » (Reprint)

Tony Hillerman's experience as a journalist and a lover of Native American culture lent an unmistakable authenticity to his mysteries. In addition to his popular series starring Navajo Tribal Police detectives Chee and Leaphorn, he wrote standalone novels, essays about the Southwest, and a warmly reviewed autobiography (Seldom Disappointed) that revealed not only his talent, but his bravery as a soldier in World War II. He died in 2008 at the age of 83.

Loaded with e-book extras (not available in the print edition), including Tony Hillerman's running commentary on his work and his series heroes Leaphorn and Chee; plus a special profile of the Navajo nation.

The New York Times

Tony Hillerman was just waiting for someone to invent the Department of Homeland Security. As if the jurisdictional power struggles among the F.B.I., the D.E.A., the Border Patrol, the Department of Land Management and the Navajo Tribal Police were not enough to cripple local law enforcement on the Indian reservations where Hillerman sets his novels, an über-agency like Homeland Security comes along to create total confusion. Hillerman orchestrates the chaos brilliantly in The Sinister Pig, devising a plot that draws all these interested parties to a lonely dirt road in the San Juan Basin in New Mexico (''the very heart of America's version of the Persian Gulf''), where an undercover agent has been murdered while investigating possible criminal sabotage of the oil pipelines. Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo police and his retired mentor, Joe Leaphorn, are quick to pick up on the implications for a federal inquiry into some $40 billion in oil revenues that never made it into the Tribal Trust Fund. But the F.B.I. elbows them off the case, and it is left to a rookie, Bernadette Manuelito, working Border Patrol near Mexico, to follow the cynical scheme to its bedrock, allowing Hillerman to tie all three investigative strands together in an extraordinary display of sheer plotting craftsmanship. — Marilyn Stasio