Blackening Song is the debut of Navajo FBI agent Ella Clah, who returns to the reservation to investigate the murder of her father, a minister. The ritual nature of the killing makes Ella's brother, a medicine man, the prime suspect. Without cooperation from the tribe, the FBI, or the local police, Ella must plumb the depths of the struggle between traditionalist and modernist forces among the Navajo to find her father's murderer.

En route to a homicide scene--Navajo rights activist Stanley Bitah has been clubbed to death--tribal police officer Ella Clah stops to check out a report of a drunk driver, only to find that Angelina Yellowhair isn't drunk but that she'd been fatally poisoned even before her car crashes.

When a young police officer's death comes under investigation, Navajo Special Investigator Ella Clah finds that faulty equipment played a major role in his demise. The underfunded Tribal Police can't update or repair anything due to the same financial problems beleaguering the entire tribe. Looking for funds, the tribe begins seriously researching a plan to build, own, and operate a new type of nuclear plant, but the fear of uranium mining divides...

"What seems to be a carjacking gone wrong leads to the death of Jimmy Blacksheep, a Navajo member of the New Mexico National Guard recently returned from Iraq. When Navajo Police Special Investigator Ella Clah receives a mysterious package in the mail, she begins to suspect that Jimmy's death is part of something larger. Complicating the case is the fact that Jimmy's brother, Samuel Blacksheep, is also a cop, on the Farmington PD. Samuel is also ostensibly...

FBI area supervisor Simmons asks the Navajo Tribal Police to help locate Andrew Thomas, a federal agent who disappeared after interrupting a Navajo ritual being performed by a group of medicine men or hataaliis. Simmons voices his displeasure when Special Investigator Ella Clah is assigned to the case; he believes that Ella became an FBI agent, more than a decade earlier, due to affirmative action-and that she left because the job was too tough for...

Returning to the Navajo Reservation and solving her father's murder taught former FBI Agent Ella Clah a great deal about herself and her people, the Dineh. She has begun to accept that that there is more to the world than can be explained by FBI training and forensic science. Newly hired as a Special Investigator with the tribal police, Ella investigates the brutal murders of several of the Dineh's "living treasures," Navajos esteemed for their knowledge...

"Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. Her excellent photography skills have cracked many cases-she is almost supernaturally good at capturing details. In fact, Rita has been hiding a secret: she sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues that other investigators overlook. As a lone portal back to the living for traumatized spirits, Rita is terrorized by nagging ghosts who won't let...

"A construction crew found the first body. The cops found three more, in a cluster that lay on both sides of the border of the Navajo Reservation. Because some of the bodies were buried outside the Rez, Navajo Police Special Investigator Ella Clah and her team must work a delicate joint investigation with the New Mexico police. Identifying the dead isn't easy--some had been buried for years--and at first the cases look to be nothing but dead ends....

Finding the solutions to modern medicine's most daunting problems was far from the mind of a girl from a small, dusty town on a Navajo reservation. But Lori Arviso Alvord would leave the traditional hogans of her people to attend the prestigious Stanford University Medical School and become the first Navajo woman surgeon. Only after conquering the high-tech realm of the operating room would this extraordinarily talented doctor realize something was...

A combination biography and cultural history chronicles the lives of Navajo Ella Bedonie and her extended family, from Ella's childhood on the Four Corners Reservation to her education and marriage.