The Wailing Wind is a mystery novel in Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn & Chee series, featuring Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn (retired) and Jim Chee as they investigate a case involving murder, greed, and Navajo lore. Like Hillerman’s other novels, it weaves together crime, Native American culture, and the stark beauty of the Southwest.
 
The story begins when Bernie Manuelito, a Navajo Tribal Police officer and Jim Chee’s love interest, discovers a dead man in a parked car near an abandoned house in the desert. The victim, Thomas Doherty, had a pocket full of gold and a connection to an old case involving a legendary lost gold mine and a supposed con artist named Wiley Denton—who was accused of murder years earlier but never convicted.
As Jim Chee investigates, he finds troubling inconsistencies, including the possibility that Doherty was trying to solve the mystery of the legendary Golden Calf Mine, a fabled lost treasure that has lured fortune seekers for years. Meanwhile, retired detective Joe Leaphorn, still haunted by the original, unsolved case, gets drawn back into the mystery.
Their investigations reveal a tangled web of fraud, obsession, and betrayal, with modern criminals following the same deadly trail as those before them.