The First Eagle is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the thirteenth in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, first published in 1998.

Retired Lt. Joe Leaphorn searches for a missing Health Department vector control specialist, whose job involves tracing the fleas that carry the Black Plague, and the two cases intertwine before all is resolved.

At Yells Back Butte near Black Mesa, Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee finds Officer Kinsman nearly dead, bashed in the head.

Chee and Leaphorn meet Old Lady Notah who tells them all the people present at Yells Back Butte on July 8, not by name but by description, including one in the PAPR garment.

The day that Acting Lt. Jim Chee, of the Navajo Tribal Police, is called to Yells Back Butte by Officer Benny Kinsman, only to find Hopi eagle poacher Robert Jano standing over Kinsman’s bleeding body, is the same day that Catherine Pollard, a vector analyst from the Arizona Health Department, vanishes from Yells Back (along with her Jeep) while she’s looking for fleas—particularly the fleas that may have carried the antibiotic-resistant plague germs that killed Anderson Nez.

So even though ex-Lt. Joe Leaphorn has retired from the Tribal Police (The Fallen Man, 1996), he’s back on the job, looking for Pollard at the request of her wealthy aunt.

Chee brings it all, including his relationship with Janet, to a climax with a theatrical coup that would put a lesser writer on the map all by itself—and that reminds you, in case you’ve forgotten, that Hillerman’s mysteries are in a class of their own.

[1]Publishers Weekly notes that Hillerman's trademark melding of Navajo tradition and modern culture is captured with crystal clarity: The modern resurgence of the black death animates Hillerman's 14th tale featuring retired widower Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee.

Bubonic plague has survived for centuries in the prairie-dog villages of the Southwest, where its continuing adaptation to modern antibiotics has increased its potential for mass destruction.

Leaphorn is hired by a wealthy Santa Fe woman to search for her granddaughter, biologist Catherine Pollard, who has disappeared during her field work as a "flea catcher," collecting plague-carrying specimens from desert rodents.

At the same time, Jim Chee arrests Robert Jano, a young Hopi man and known poacher of eagles, in the bludgeoning death of another Navajo Police officer at a site where the biologist was seen working.

As Leaphorn learns more about Pollard's work from her boss in the Indian Health Service and an epidemiologist with ties to a pharmaceutical company, the U.S. Attorney's office decides to seek the death penalty against Jano, who is being represented by Chee's former fiancee, Janet Pete, recently returned from Washington, D.C. Hillerman's trademark melding of Navajo tradition and modern culture is captured with crystal clarity in this tale of an ancient scourge's resurgence in today's world.

In The First Eagle (HarperCollins, $25), which like his previous police procedurals is set on the Big Reservation, straddling the Arizona-New Mexico border, a Navajo woman by the name of Old Lady Notah claims to have sighted a skinwalker -- a witch.

When one of the scientists disappears from Yells Back Butte, where a Navajo Tribal Police officer was killed, will Leaphorn and his young colleague Jim Chee put their faith in skinwalkers, medieval plague -- or something more human and more sinister?

People's conflicting beliefs are never easily resolved, as Acting Lieutenant Chee, a traditional Navajo who is studying to be a shaman, learns to his sorrow once again.

Surrendering to Hillerman's strong narrative voice and supple storytelling techniques, we come to see that ancient cultures and modern sciences are simply different mythologies for the same reality.

Without getting corny or patronizing, he's able to convey the Navajo reverence for the land and to differentiate how the white man and the Native American view the planet.

Hillerman stage-manages all the various plot points — the brain-dead cop, the missing woman, the possible plague, the violent eagle — skillfully and subtly.

Jano faces a death penalty once Chee arrests him for killing his officer, rather than simply capturing a protected species of eagle.

Part of the plot revolves around the bubonic plague, a disease with a terrible history in Europe in the Middle Ages when it was called the Black Death and worldwide in the 19th century.

The 1974 public law and following court cases assigning one large area for the Hopi, requiring thousands of Navajos to move, did not resolve the issue.

Further, the people of each tribe have different patterns of settlement (Navajo are dispersed over larger amount of land, originally from their occupation as sheepherders, while the Hopi are generally settled in villages, raise corn, make art and jewelry).

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 47 geographical locations, real and fictional, mentioned in The First Eagle.