The Ghostway is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the sixth in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series.
The central character "Chee is developed to greater depth than before",[2] though that reviewer felt that the three novels featuring Leaphorn (first three in this series) were more powerful.
"[4] Hosteen Joseph Joe, finishing his laundry in Shiprock, New Mexico, answers questions put by a man in a new car, about Leroy Gorman.
Joe does not know that man, but studies the Polaroid photo of him in front of his aluminum trailer home, set next to a cottonwood tree in fall.
With FBI agents Sharkey and Witrey, and Deputy Bales, Chee finds Albert Gorman buried near what is now a death hogan, but not the photo Joseph Joe described.
He meets two city police detectives, Shaw and Wells, who know the FBI agent Upchurch who died or was killed in trying to close a nine-year case on the McNair gang, experts in high priced car thievery and the cocaine trade, who leave no witnesses.
Margaret Sosi is finishing the last day of the Ghostway sing to purify her from being in the death hogan, surrounded by her clan.
Beno (aka Grayson) is unarmed, gives up, and is arrested by FBI agents at the Cañoncito Reservation police station.
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 63 geographical locations, real and fictional, mentioned in The Ghost Way.
[5] Kirkus Reviews finds this novel has some pockets of sentimentality, but keeps the crucial features of the novel in compelling balance: The tension between the Navajo way-of-life and the tempting white-world outside--always an element in Hillerman's somber outings for Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police--is central and emphatic in this haunting, absorbing investigation.
Throughout the novel, Jim broods (sometimes too ponderously) on his relationship with non-Navajo teacher Mary Landon, who has been pressuring him to take a job outside the reservation.
Albert Gorman, a Navajo who moved to L.A. and became a car-thief, returns to the reservation, apparently looking for his brother Leroy--and is wounded in a shootout with a pursuing L.A. hitman.
To answer these questions, Jim makes a rare trip outside the reservation--to LA., where he learns that the Gorman brothers were involved with a powerful local gang, that Leroy had agreed to testify against the gang-leaders, becoming a federally protected witness.
He finds Margaret Billy Sosi, then loses her again (after she saves him from a gang assassin); he has touching encounters with an elderly friend of the late Albert Gorman, with some of the few Navajos living in L.A. And finally, after returning home and finding the body of Hosteen Begay, Jim brings all the clues and themes together in a strong final twist--one that also helps him to accept a gentle compromise from Mary Landon.
Despite pockets of excess sentimentality: one of Hillerman's best Navajo mysteries--keeping suspense, Indian lore, and character in stately yet compelling balance.
[1]Marcia Muller writes that "While not as powerful as the Leaphorn novels, The Ghostway ties its thematic matter into the plot in an extremely satisfying way, and Chee is developed to greater depth than before.
"[2] Alice Cromie, writing in the Chicago Tribune, likes this novel, finding it choice reading.
"[4] In contrast with Muller's view, Callendar says this novel "moves alertly along, has all the flavor and exoticism one associates with Mr. Hillerman and is one of the best in the series.