The First Eagle

Don't miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+!

"The First Eagle displays all the strengths of Hillerman's writing: a vivid sense of place, nuanced characters, and a complex, engrossing plot." - Washington Post

The thirteenth novel in the Leaphorn and Chee series from New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman, a landmark of Native American crime fiction.

When Acting Lt. Jim Chee catches a Hopi poacher huddled over a butchered Navajo Tribal police officer, he has an open-and-shut case-until his former boss, Joe Leaphorn, blows it wide open. Now retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, Leaphorn has been hired to find a hotheaded female biologist hunting for the key to a virulent plague lurking in the Southwest. The scientist disappeared from the same area the same day the Navajo cop was murdered. Is she a suspect or another victim? And what about a report that a skinwalker-a Navajo witch-was seen at the same time and place too? For Leaphorn and Chee, the answers lie buried in a complicated knot of superstition and science, in a captivating cultural mystery where the worlds of native peoples and outside forces converge and collide.