Skeleton Man

Skeleton Man is the seventeenth crime fiction novel in the Joe Leaphorn / Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series by Tony Hillerman, first published in 2004. It was a New York Times best-sellerA spectacular crash of two planes above the Grand Canyon in the 1950s killed all aboard, and filled the Canyon with everything that had once been on the two planes. The event alters long held stories of the tribes who live on the Canyon floor, and leaves a pregnant woman about to be married on her own, when her fiancé's family rejects her and her child. The child is grown, and seeks her father's remains, while the lawyer who gained financially by rejection of the child fights to hold on to his wealth. A couple of expensive diamonds bring Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito into her story, where greed is contested against family support in the grandeur of the canyon.