Tony Hillerman's eighth novel brings together Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee, the two Navajo Tribal Policemen of his previous novels. It forces the older, more worldly Leaphorn, to confront that part of the Navajo culture that he has always rejected shamanism and its reverse negative, adan'ti, and it presents the young, educated, yet deeply traditional Chee, himself a fledgling shaman, with the more personal problem of staying alive.