Dance Hall of the Dead, by Tony Hillerman (New York: Harper, 2009; first published in 1973; second title in Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police series)
While characters and story are “purely fictional” the setting for Dance Hall of the Dead, according to the author, is “genuine,” with “the Village of Zuñi and the landscape of the Zuñi reservation and the adjoining Ramah Navajo reservation…accurately depicted.” Readers are immersed in the New Mexico landscape and Zuñi traditions as Navajo Tribal policeman Joe Leaphorn searches for two missing boys and a “brutal killer.”
In another two or three minutes the lower edge of the red sun would sink behind the strata of clouds hanging over western Arizona. Now the oblique angle of its late afternoon rays were almost parallel to the slope of hillside toward Zuñi Wash. They projected the moving shadow of Ted Isaacs almost a thousand feet down the hillside, and beside it stretched the motionless shadow of Lieutenant Joseph Leaphorn. Every juniper, every bushy yellow chamiso, every outcrop of stone streaked the yellow-gray of the autumn grass with a stripe of dark blue shadow. And beyond the hillside, beyond the gridwork of twine that marked Isaacs dig, two miles across the valley, the great bulk of Corn Mountain loomed, its broken cliffs sharply outlined in the reds and pinks of reflected sunlight and the blacks of shadows. It was one of those moments of startling beauty which as a matter of habit Joe Leaphorn took time to examine and savor. But he was preoccupied. – from Dance Hall of the Dead, by Tony Hillerman
