Broken Circle: True Story of Murder and Magic in Idian Country: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI

In 1974 mutilated bodies of three Navajo men were found near Farmington, N.M., an Anglo community on the edge of the Navajo reservation where rolling Indian drunks had become a teenage rite of passage. Soon three Farmington high school boys admitted guilt and received light sentences as juveniles. Upon hearing in 1988 that the three young murderers had become victims of Navajo witchcraft (one died in an unlikely auto accident and the other two have become psychologically unstable), Barker ( The Hiroshima Maidens ) began research into the so-called Chokecherry Massacre. Projecting into the minds of the perpetrators, he delivers a chilling and remarkable tale. Reading much like a Tony Hillerman novel, the book also exposes the roots of racial intolerance between Native Americans and whites and suggests that Indian medicine men indeed have supernatural powers. (Apr.)