In the Pacific theater during World War II, a Marine is assigned to protect a Navajo codetalker.

Follows Navajo police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee as they investigate a series of crimes in the Navajo Nation near Monument Valley in the early 1970s.

An archaeologist turned pottery poacher thinks she has cracked the secret of the vanished Anasazi culture, when she herself vanishes. Leaphorn and Chee must piece together a case as complicated as the decorated pots that seem to motivate the killer.

The popular hero of several Tony Hillerman best-sellers, Navajo cop Jim Chee, is a student of the old ways who wanted to be a medicine man before he became a lawman. Now as a cop covering the Arizona Territories belonging to the Hopi and Navajo Indians, he's torn between both worlds. When the badly mutilated victim of a Navajo skinwalker is found on Hopi land, Chee is suddenly plunged into a world of mystery filled with drug dealers, F.B.I. agents,...

The Navajo Tribal Police investigate the murder of a medicine man. At the crime scene is a partially completed pictograph. One clue sends a chill through a young officer: the arrow used in the killing has a tip of human bone, a sign that a Navajo spirit - a "skinwalker" - is at work.

A battle-weary Marine is assigned to guard - and ultimately befriends - a young Navajo soldier who has been trained to be a code talker. This code, the Navajo code, and the men who knew the code, were to be guarded as they went into action. It was the unspoken duty of the Marine to kill the Navajo soldier before he could be taken prisoner of war by the Japanese. This is the one wartime code that was never broken by the enemy.