People of Darkness is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the fourth in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, first published in 1980.

New crimes involve a very wealthy white man and several Navajos he befriended nearly 30 years earlier, helping them support their church.

A review written in 2010 was still impressed with the novel, declaring "the great triumph of Hillerman’s art lies in the way he was able to weave this Native American theme into the story, along with all the accompanying cultural background, without ever compromising the mystery."

A bacteriologist in the cancer research hospital, waiting for laboratory results, sees a blond-haired man move something from his car to a pick-up truck parked in an illegal space.

A few months later, Jim Chee is asked by Mrs. Vines to find a box stolen from her house, wanting to hire him off-duty.

Chee learns that the man whose truck exploded a few months back was Emerson Charley, son of Dillon and head of the People of Darkness church, who has been in the hospital at the University of New Mexico since that day, ill with cancer.

When Colton Wolf learns about Emerson Charley's death, he goes to the hospital morgue to find, steal and bury his body, which the cancer group wants to autopsy.

At a local rug auction, Tomas Charley tells Jim Chee that his father's body was stolen from the hospital.

Chee and Landon find the long-interred body of the sixth man, and can see abnormal bone growth on his skeleton below his pouch, still carrying the mole amulet.

Vines did not want an active oil field in someone else's ownership when he could make a fortune by buying the lease for the land and selling the rights for the uranium.

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 24 geographical locations, real and fictional, mentioned in People of Darkness.

[2]The Sun-Sentinel stated, "Not only are the stories well-written and gripping, but they also play against a background of authentic Indian culture, an incredible achievement for a non-Indian writer.

"[3] Kirkus Reviews determined: Hillerman may overdo the Indian vs. white identity crisis this time--Mary and Jim talk too much--but otherwise this is thoroughly splendid work: moody, atmospheric, complex without contrivance, and properly unsettling.