Chapter 1 Summary

A Thief of Time is a mystery story centered on two protagonists, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, who are trying to solve a missing person's case and a string of recent thefts and murders. The story is set in the modern day in the Four Corners region, both on and off the Navajo Reservation

Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal is wearing a backpack and hiking at night in the desert. She is going somewhere secretly, and she has lied to her friends about her destination. She led her friends to believe she was going to spend the night in either Shiprock or Farmington, New Mexico when in fact she was planning on hiking to a secret destination near Bluff, Utah.

During the course of the chapter, told in third-person from the point of view of Dr. Friedman-Bernal, the anthropologist thinks about her life as a...