Talking God is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the ninth in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, published in 1989.
One murdered man near Gallup and the desecration of a Northeastern cemetery, protesting ineffectively the keeping of native American bones in the Smithsonian, lead Leaphorn and Chee, separately, to Washington D.C. to solve interlinked crimes and preserve Navajo cultural artifacts.
There are no footprints to follow, but the note sends him to interview Agnes Tsotsie, who shows him the letter from Henry Highhawk, who will attend her Night Chant.
Always curious, Leaphorn learns that an Amtrak train made an emergency stop in the desert, the likely explanation for the body found near the railroad tracks with no footprints around him.
Highhawk is attending a Night Chant ceremony on the Navajo Reservation, where Jim Chee arrests him with aid from his friend Cowboy Dashee, for the FBI.
Fleck's revenge is to kill as many Chileans as he can, trailing them to the exhibit of Incan masks in the Natural History Museum with a high ranking general from the present rightist government, the same goal that brings Santerro.
Tensions mount as Chee pulls apart the exhibit to find the plastic explosives packed under the mask, and Leaphorn kicks apart the remote detonator that falls from Santerro's hands.
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 29 geographical locations, real and fictional, mentioned in Talking God.
Joe Leaphorn (a somber, skeptical widower) and Officer Jim Chee (a younger, more mystical sort), Navajo cops whose paths cross once again--this time in Washington, D.C., where separate trails lead both men to shady doings in and around the Smithsonian.
The Washington action, complete with Elmore Leonard-like closeups of the pathetic psycho-hit-man, lacks the intense, unique atmosphere of such series standouts as The Ghostway.
Still, if less richly nuanced with Navajo themes and scenes than previous tales, this minor Hillerman remains far-above-average crime fiction: vividly peopled, forcefully told.
Here he sets Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee in Washington, D.C., as each uses vacation time to follow separate cases that will connect in a clash of violence at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History.
Leaphorn's interest rises from a puzzling homicide case--an unidentified corpse found near Gallup, N.M., with a note mentioning a pending Yeibichai ceremony.
Just as Leaphorn's tenacity reveals the dead man was a leftist Chilean terrorist, Highhawk is killed (in a spooky late-night scene in the Museum) and the pivotal role of the Talking God mask comes into play.
Leaphorn's grief over the recent death of his wife, Chee's sorrow at the end of an impossible love affair, both men's sense of alienation in the capital city's urban sophistication suffuse this slim, somewhat contrived, tale with palpable melancholy.
[5]Jonathan Kellerman writing in the Chicago Tribune finds that "Hillerman is a master craftsman of plot and pacing, a demon at characterization, as concerned with the whydunit as the whodunit.
He concludes "suffice it to say that the final tapestry is flawless-logical, elegant yet simple, devoid of gimmickry-and that the denouement is immensely suspenseful and smooth as cream.