Among the most original crime stories of the last thirty years, Tony Hillerman's novels featuring one or both of his two Navajo tribal policemen are wholly convincing in their re-creation of a culture in which values are very different from those of the American society surrounding it. Joe Leaphorn, the older of the two men, is caught between respect for the old Navajo ways and the skepticism he has learned as he has made his way in the white world; the younger Jim Chee is, paradoxically, the one more open to the shamanism and ceremony of the past.

A Thief of Time begins with the disappearance of an anthropologist who has been conducting her own private investigations into the scattered archaeological sites of the long-gone Anasazi peoples in the deserts and mountains of the American South West. Leaphorn, grieving for the death of his wife and about to retire from the Navajo police, is drawn into the search for the missing woman. Meanwhile, Chee stumbles across the corpses of two 'thieves of time', pothunters and artifact seekers who desecrate sacred ground in their search for profits. The dead thieves appear to have been involved in a larger plot to dig up and sell archaeological treasures on the black market. Leaphorn and Chee join forces as it becomes clear that not only are the cases on which they are working connected but that there are some further links with a series of horrific killings from the past. Brilliantly paced and superbly constructed, A Thief of Time, like Hillerman's other novels, is memorable not only for its suspense and mystery but for the skill with which he evokes the bleak beauty of the landscape in which his story is set and the culture from which his two protagonists, in different ways, take their strength.

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