The Wailing Wind is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the fifteenth in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, first published in 2002.

Sergeant Jim Chee contacts retired police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn for advice on how to resolve the problem of the old tin, now evidence removed from a crime scene.

This renews Leaphorn's interest in a case involving Wiley Denton, a Gallup oil and gas magnate who shot and killed Marvin McKay.

First, Leaphorn visits the scene where Doherty's body was found, discreetly replaces the tin with its sand / gold contents, and then points it out to Cowboy Dashee, the officer at the site.

Manuelito finds the place of Doherty's murder, based on the seeds and the ashes from the 1999 fire, and sees old Placer gold mining artifacts.

Later, the empty hogan nearby is found to belong to Hostiin James Peshlakai, who is arrested by the FBI, as the shells match his gun.

Two events occurred the day McKay was murdered, on a past Halloween; the second was a report of a woman wailing, heard by four high school students who were crossing Fort Wingate army munitions depot, a vast place with a long history, used for archives in the bunkers.

Leaphorn, who knows the true sequence of events five years earlier, remains in charge by driving to the bunker where they find the mummified body of Denton's wife Linda, and her love note as she waited for him to rescue her.

The music she played that night, heard by the passing students intermingled with the sound of the wind, was dismissed as a Halloween prank when police could not find the source.

Leaphorn reads letters in the archives, written in the 19th century about why the Navajo disliked white men seeking gold in their territory.

Placer mining is a technique for extracting gold (or other precious metals) from alluvial deposits in a stream bed, as Officer Manuelito, and earlier Thomas Doherty, saw in the area exposed by fire.

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 Wailing Wind.

[9] Kirkus Reviews remarks the top-notch detective work and a solution worthy of the puzzle: Two years ago, wealthy oil-lease magnate Wiley Denton confessed to shooting Marvin McKay dead—a con man, he testified, whose offer of a partnership in the lost Golden Calf goldmine backfired when he tried to leave Denton’s place with the $50,000 down payment in lieu of any legal agreement—pleaded self-defense, and served his time.

Case closed for everybody except Joe Leaphorn, retired Legendary Lieutenant of the Navajo Tribal Police, who’s always wondered what became of Denton’s beautiful young wife Linda, who vanished the day of the killing.

Officer Bernadette Manuelito has discovered the body of Thomas Doherty, a Forest Service employee who had his old interest in the Golden Calf, in his truck.

Trouble is, Bernie didn’t realize Doherty was a murder victim and allowed the crime scene to get so trampled that the Apache County Sheriff’s Department has grabbed the case away from the Tribal Police.

Jim Chee, who’s awfully attached to her, can work out a way to cover her misstep, she’s already found the place where Doherty was killed—and begun an investigation that will link both murders to the rumors of a spectral wailing woman at Fort Wingate the Halloween night that Denton shot McKay.

Top-notch detective work by all hands, a solution fully worthy of the puzzle, and all the hard-won wisdom on cultural clashes between Navajos and whites you’d expect from Hillerman (Hunting Badger, 2000, etc.).

It seems a group of teens shortcutting across the area had endured a close call with La Llorana, a mythical wailing woman.

The seemingly insignificant turns critical and the loose ends tie up in one tidy conclusion as Hillerman repeatedly shines in this masterfully complex new novel.