IN 1998, POLICE IN CORTEZ, in southern Colorado, stopped three men in a stolen water truck. The men opened fire with automatic weapons, killing one of the officers. Three more cops were wounded in the chase that followed; one of the fugitives killed himself, and the other two disappeared into the canyons on the Arizona-Utah border.

More than five hundred officers from twenty federal, state and tribal agencies searched for them for several months, and a quarter-million-dollar reward offered by the FBI brought in uncounted bounty hunters and amateurs.

The fugitives have never been found.

I've heard people wonder how it's possible that that many cops, given that much time, couldn't have found just about anybody anywhere. Those people have never seen that country. An unearthly and unforgiving lithic maze, hundreds of square miles of twisting canyons, dry as bleached bone except in the season of violent rains that make the canyons boil with floods, it is a land that keeps its secrets. You could easily lose two hundred men in it; you might even lose a city.

That mysterious country is the setting for two fine new mystery novels, one by the master of Southwestern mysteries and one by a team of two writers who have written several earlier novels that used archaeology as an element in their mysteries.

Tony Hillerman opens his new novel, Hunting Badger, with a note that describes the Cortez shooting and its aftermath, and the book is dedicated to the officer who was killed. Hillerman borrows a few plot elements from it, too -- three thieves, one suicide, two vanished into the canyonlands. But his thieves rob a casino run by the Ute tribe, shoot a couple of guards, then apparently steal an airplane and disappear somewhere in the Four Corners -- a development that brings Navajo Tribal Police Sergeant Jim Chee back from vacation early.

Yes, that's right, Sergeant Chee. The lieutenant thing didn't work out, and Chee is just as happy it didn't. He's taken a long vacation, been reassigned to his home territory of Shiprock and, he muses, "Best of all, when he did report for work there wouldn't be a single piece of paperwork awaiting his attention."

Just as administration didn't suit Chee, retirement doesn't really suit Joe Leaphorn. The Legendary Lieutenant is involved in the robbery case almost as soon as Chee is, though he's drawn into it by a slip of paper with three names on it, handed to him in a restaurant by a cantankerous old rancher named Roy Gershwin. Gershwin doesn't want anyone to know he's the source of the names -- three men he says are militia members -- but he wants the FBI to know about them.

Fans of Chee and Leaphorn will be happy to hear that soon they are working together on the case. They'll also be glad to find both men moving past their romantic losses -- the death of Leaphorn's wife, Emma, and Chee's breakup with Janet Pete -- and into new relationships. Leaphorn's friendship with no-nonsense anthropologist Louisa Bourebonette is growing warmer as he recognizes that, like him, she has one foot in the Indian world and one in the white one. And the steadfast devotion of Officer Bernadette Manuelito is finally getting through to Chee.

In fact, Louisa and Bernie turn out to be instrumental in the resolution of the case. But not before Hillerman serves up his usual satisfying dish of Southwestern culture and country, seasoned with dry humor and a dash of danger. The Hillerman fans on your holiday gift list couldn't ask for a better present.

Hillerman isn't the only one mining the Arizona-Utah border country for mystery, though. In Thunderhead, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child make fine use of the legends and landscape of that territory to tell a compelling tale.

Nora Kelly's career as an archaeologist began long before grad school, at the knee of her father. Padraic Kelly was a self-taught old-timer who teetered between serious research and pothunting -- until he disappeared into those Utah canyons 16 years ago.

Now Nora is Dr. Kelly and an employee of the prestigious Santa Fe Archaeological Institute. But her academic serenity is shattered when she visits her family's old, empty house in the foothills above Santa Fe to check on a report of trespassers. There, she is first accosted by a pair of terrifying dog-like creatures that speak to her in human voices, demanding a letter. She escapes, only to find a letter nearby -- a 16-year-old letter from her long-gone father.

In that letter, he claims to have found Quivira, the legendary lost city of gold of the Anasazi. Coronado couldn't find it, nor could countless other treasure hunters. But Padraic Kelly did, and his daughter believes that with the letter she can find it, too.

Soon she is the head of an expedition of archaeological all-stars, supplied with everything from high-tech computer imaging technology to a gourmet chef. The institute's director, Ernest Goddard, is less interested in golden treasures than in making archaeological history -- he believes, as Nora does, that Quivira might provide answers to the unyielding riddle of what happened to the Anasazi. Builders of astonishingly complex cities and cliff dwellings, creators of a sophisticated culture that spread across the Southwest and traded across two continents, they apparently walked away from it all around the end of the 13th century, for reasons no one has ever fully explained.

Goddard sends Nora to look for the answers, and she finds even more than she bargained for. Preston and Child people the expedition with an intriguing cast, from Goddard's enchanting and ruthless daughter, Sloane, to Roscoe Swire, a tender-hearted, courageous wrangler. They also do a fine job of bringing the country to life in all its vivid, hard glory, and they make breathtaking use of its perils. If you have ever been to cliff dwellings like those at Mesa Verde or Keet Seel, you'll appreciate the detail and realism with which they're described here.

And Preston and Child weave a wonderful story out of the stuff of Anasazi myth and archaeology, including the dark evidence of cannibalism in the culture's later days. Nora's struggle to understand the past and survive the present makes for a fascinating tale.

As always, titles reviewed in Colette's List may be purchased at a significant discount from The Bookstall.

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette's List 10: Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

Colette's List 11: Small Towns, Mean Streets

Colette's List 12: James Lee Burke: Blood On The Bayou

Colette's List 13: Rick Harsch: Rust Belt Noir

Colette's List 14: Harrison: A Novel Worth Waiting For

Colette's List 15: Kingsolver: Power & Its Price

Colette's List 16: Macdonald: Secret Lusts & Terrible Revenge

Colette's List 17: Creating Colette: A Scandal In Paris

Colette's List 18: Rushdie: Shake, Rattle & Roll

Colette's List 19: Betrayal & Madness, Loss & Redemption

Colette's List 20: Summer Reading: Death Cruise

Colette's List 21: Dennis Lehane's Sinister City

Colette's List 22: Broken Language, Busted Bench

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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