SOURCE: Day, Anthony. “Hillerman's Best Yet.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (2 January 2000): 10.

In the following review, Day praises Hunting Badger, calling the novel “skillful and convincing.”

Hunting Badger is the 13th of Tony Hillerman's mystery novels featuring Navajo Tribal Police officers Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, and it is one of his most successful. Hillerman combines evocative descriptions of the rugged landscape and people of the Four Corners area of the Southwest, a sensitive appreciation of Navajo culture torn between tradition and modernism and a lively contemporary plot to make a jaunty and satisfying tale of intrigue, deception and surprise.

This fictional story recalls—and refers to—a real one in the same area. On May 4, 1998, three men shot and killed a Colorado police officer. An immense search, led by an incompetently bureaucratic FBI team, failed to find the killers. (The body of one of them was found...