Skeleton Man is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the seventeenth in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, first published in 2004.

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.

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.

When two passenger airplanes collide over the Grand Canyon in the 1950s killing all aboard, John Clarke's body is lost, as is the briefcase of diamonds he had locked to his wrist.

When Clarke's father dies without heir shortly after the crash, the family fortune is entrusted to the estate's attorney, Dan Plymale, to create a charitable foundation.

Then Louisa Bourebonette relates the stories she has heard from older Havasupais about the man with the diamonds living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and the flyers from a woman seeking her father's remains from that plane crash, which Leaphorn shares with Chee.

She does not stay in one place, but walks and finds the slot (a cave but with an opening to sunlight way above) along the canyon wall where the man had lived, and his body, long dead of natural causes.

[3] Manuelito and Joanna Craig take shelter on a ledge, while Chandler leaves with his diamonds and is then carried out by the force of the instant river made by the rain.

For example, Leaphorn and Shorty McGinnis make passing mention of Tso and the singer Margaret Cigaret, who were in the novel Listening Woman.

Bernadette Manuelito recalls the story told her of the way Chee handled the driver who made amends after killing a man while driving drunk, yet needed to stay out of jail to care for his grandson, part of the plot of Sacred Clowns.

[4][5][6][7] In Skeleton Man this includes: Marilyn Stasio writing in The New York Times observes: But rather than solving the mystery in a conventional sense, to unravel these reworked myths reaffirms their power.

[8]Kirkus Reviews finds this not so much a mystery as a story of suspense as the main characters converge in the treacherous landscape of the Grand Canyon: A brain-damaged Hopi holds the key to a fortune in diamonds, and even bigger stakes, in this treasure hunt.When he died nearly 50 years ago in a plane crash over the Grand Canyon, John Clarke had a case of diamonds chained to his left wrist and a pregnant fiancée waiting at the altar.

sort out Billy’s and Shorty’s wild tales of how they acquired the diamonds, it becomes clear that three separate parties will be converging on the floor of the Grand Canyon.