While Hillerman brings back his two cops, Chee and Leaphorn, he introduces major changes in their lives. He also returns Janet Pete, Chee's half-Navajo, half-white fiancee, but also adds a new woman to Chee's life, Bernadette "Bernie" Manuelito. Hillerman also assembles a cast of minor characters.

Joe Leaphorn is now retired and no longer a police lieutenant. Due to this change, he attempts to discover what to do with himself now that he has time on his hands. As he wryly notes, he has done everything at least once that he wanted to do when he retired. When Breedlove's skeleton is found on Ship Rock by some climbers, Leaphorn enters the case only because a decade earlier he had been in charge of the unsolved missing person case. As he becomes more involved in the mystery, he hires himself out as a private detective working for the Breedlove...