The Sinister Pig is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the sixteenth in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, first published in 2003.

Bernadette Manuelito is on routine surveillance in her new position as a US Customs Patrol Officer, when she finds the Tuttle ranch in the boot heel of New Mexico, where a truck with Mexican license plates enters.

Winsor talks about the mistaken killing of Manken, who was not involved in illegal drugs, but hunting out the situation on royalties owed for resources extraction, and mentions the fate of Chrissy.

Customs officers, the FBI, the DEA, the state and county police, and Dashee of the Bureau of Land Management discuss who has authority, until someone from Homeland Security arrives to trump them all.

As if the jurisdictional power struggles among the F.B.I., the D.E.A., the Border Patrol, the Department of Land Management and the Navajo Tribal Police were not enough to cripple local law enforcement on the Indian reservations where Hillerman sets his novels, an über-agency like Homeland Security comes along to create total confusion.

Hillerman orchestrates the chaos brilliantly in THE SINISTER PIG (HarperCollins, $25.95), devising a plot that draws all these interested parties to a lonely dirt road in the San Juan Basin in New Mexico (the very heart of America's version of the Persian Gulf), where an undercover agent has been murdered while investigating possible criminal sabotage of the oil pipelines.

Jim Chee of the Navajo police and his retired mentor, Joe Leaphorn, are quick to pick up on the implications for a federal inquiry into some $40 billion in oil revenues that never made it into the Tribal Trust Fund.

elbows them off the case, and it is left to a rookie, Bernadette Manuelito, working Border Patrol near Mexico, to follow the cynical scheme to its bedrock, allowing Hillerman to tie all three investigative strands together in an extraordinary display of sheer plotting craftsmanship.

[2]Kirkus Reviews finds this novel to be light on plot, the mystery too easy to solve: Though you might expect them to have their hands full with rumors of war, Washington powerbrokers seem obsessed these days with whatever's happening in the big-sky New Mexico territory Hillerman's long since branded as his own (The Wailing Wind, 2002, etc.).

And retired legend Lt. Joe Leaphorn, when Chee hikes out to Window Rock to consult him, does little more than brandish a sheaf of maps showing the locations of gas pipelines from Mexico.

It's Chee's former officer and lost love Bernadette Manuelito, fleeing the NTP for the Customs Patrol, who comes up with the crucial break on the case quite by accident when she follows a truck into a ranch that's raising oryxes for self-styled safari hunters and takes one photograph too many.

When the body of an undercover agent, who's been looking for clues to the whereabouts of billions of dollars missing from the Tribal Trust Funds, turns up on reservation property near Four Corners, Navajo cop Sgt.

But the book's real star is officer Bernadette "Bernie" Manuelito, Chee's erstwhile romantic interest, now working in the New Mexico boot heel for the U.S. Border Patrol.

Help comes from two old friends, the retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and the former Navajo tribal policewoman Bernadette Manuelito, who escaped a stalled relationship with Chee to join the U.S. Border Patrol.

This outing ventures beyond the Navajo landscape that Hillerman's fans expect, but they-and general readers-should enjoy the broader geographical and social canvas just as well, in this tale of ordinary people unraveling knots of fraud and skulduggery.

The pig is a piece inserted to clean the pipeline, in more recent days to track the location of leaks and to separate commodities sent through the pipe (e.g., gasoline followed by kerosene).