Skeleton Man

Skeleton Manis a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the seventeenth in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, first published in 2004. It was a New York Times best-seller A spectacular crash of two planes above the Grand Canyon in the 1950s killed all aboard, and filled the Canyon with everything that had once been on the two planes. The event alters long held stories of the tribes who live on the Canyon floor, and leaves a pregnant woman about to be married on her own, when her fiancé's family rejects her and her child. The child is grown, and seeks her father's remains, while the lawyer who gained financially by rejection of the child fights to hold on to his wealth. A couple of expensive diamonds bring Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito into her story, where greed is contested against family support in the grandeur of the canyon. Plot summary When two passenger airplanes collide over the Grand Canyon in the 1950s killing all aboard, John Clarke's body is lost, as is the briefcase of diamonds he had locked to his wrist. Scorning Mr. Clarke's pregnant fiancée, the Clarke family disclaims the out-of-wedlock daughter, Joanna Craig. When Clarke's father dies without heir shortly after the crash, the family fortune is entrusted to the estate's attorney, Dan Plymale, to create a charitable foundation. Mr. Plymale then proceeds to live well as executor of the foundation's funds, while Joanna Craig and her mother make their own way.