Hoping to return home after an unwise affair that ended with a bounty on his head, adventurer Ethan Gage teams up with grizzled Norwegian Magnus Bloodhammer on a quest to find a legendary artifact that some believe possesses the power to control the weather.

Natty Bumppo, a young white hunter brought up in the Delaware Indian tribe, has to defend settlers before returning to the Iroquois who have allowed him parole.

"Three shotgun blasts rip through the side of Officer Jim Chee's trailer as the Navajo tribal policeman sleeps. He survives, but the inexplicable attack has raised disturbing questions about a lawman once beyond reproach. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn wonders why Chee was a target and what connection the assault has to a series of gruesome murders plaguing the reservation. But the investigation is leading Leaphorn and Chee into a nightmare of ritual, witchcraft,...

Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn are at it again in the Southwest in search of a killer of a young Navajo Tribal Police officer. At first it seems an open-and-shut case and they are ready to charge a Hopi man. In addition, Leaphorn has been hired to find a woman biologist who disappeared while studying a new form of bubonic plague found in the dry land of the Southwest. Are these cases linked?