Hunting Badger

Three armed men vanish into the canyon wilderness of the Utah-Arizona border after raiding a Ute tribal casino, and the FBI—with its helicopters and databases—is hunting in the wrong direction. That gap between institutional certainty and actual truth is where Jim Chee and retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn do their best work. Chee spots a dangerous flaw in the federal theory; Leaphorn traces the case backward to a legendary Ute outlaw-hero whose shadow still falls across the red rock country. What begins as a manhunt becomes something stranger and more layered—a story about myth, landscape, and what happens when modern law enforcement fails to understand the land it operates in.

Hillerman writes the Four Corners country with the authority of someone who knows it bone-deep, and the terrain here functions almost as a character—ancient, indifferent, full of concealment. The Leaphorn-Chee dynamic is at its best when the two men work separately and then converge, each carrying different pieces of the puzzle. The prose is spare but never thin, and Hillerman trusts readers to sit with ambiguity before the landscape finally gives up its secrets.