Listening Woman is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the third in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, first published in 1978.

"[3] After talking with Hosteen Tso to learn what will best improve his health, Margaret Cigarette walks away from the hogan on Nokaito Bench to ponder his situation and prepare her advice.

He saw a name on a light carried by a boy there, which he realized was the name of the pilot of a helicopter lost in a dramatic theft of cash from an armored car in Santa Fe a few years earlier by members of the Buffalo Society, an extremist break-away group from AIM.

While there, Leaphorn realizes that Mrs. Cigarette sat in a different spot than he originally assumed, one that meant the killer of Hosteen Tso and Annie came from the canyon, not the road.

He survives the dog, fire set to kill him, dynamite closing a cavern entrance, and long hours in total darkness.

Gold Rims is part of the Buffalo Society and of the hostage event that Leaphorn heard mentioned on the police radio hours before.

Waiting for that moment, Leaphorn finds the cave where Standing Medicine had left over thirty sand paintings for a special ceremony, a great gift to his people from over 100 years earlier.

In his 2011 book Tony Hillerman's Navajoland: Hideouts, Haunts, and Havens in the Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee Mysteries, author Laurance D. Linford has listed the following 28 geographical locations, real and fictional, mentioned in Listening Woman.

[4] The novel was well received, with author Marcia Muller stating that "his stark depiction of the New Mexico landscape is particularly fine" and that she found the work to be "a compelling and often chilling book".

[1] Kirkus Reviews finds it a satisfying novel: Like so many other mystery men these days, the splendid Mr. Hillerman has allowed his detective, Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Police, to get tangled up with terrorists: a Boy Scout troop is held hostage by a fringe Indian-rights gang whose leader is a madman out for revenge and personal gain.

The plots out at Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park ("this whole Short Mountain country ain't worth hitting a man with a stick for") have never been Hillerman's magic.

That comes instead from his unhokey Indian population, convincingly mystical (sand paintings and ritual cures play key roles here) but alive to modern ways and talk; from the contrast between highways and mountains, asphalt and rock; and from the quiet, wise presence of Leaphorn himself, unselfconsciously drawing on the best of two clashing cultures.

With enough action (Joe survives a fife[sic] ordeal) and last-second twists to grab those uninterested in the topnotch atmosphere, Hillman's overdue return (five years since Dance Hall of the Dead) should draw murmurs of contentment from all sides.

The plan was to use Monster Slayer and Born for Water, the hero twins of the Navajo Genesis story, in a mystery involving orphaned brothers (a “spoiled priest” and a militant radical) who collide in their campaigns to help their people.

I would use a shaman, the last person to talk to my murder victim before he is killed, as a source for religious information meaningless to the FBI but revealing to Leaphorn.