Nightwing, by Martin Cruz Smith

Nightwing, by Martin Cruz Smith. 1979 paperback. 255 pages, very nice condition.

Vampire bats. Gray. Evil. Clever. Deadly. Driven by blood-hunger across the American landscape, they bred and multiplied, unseen and unsuspected. Thousands. Each one a grisly messenger of death. No warm-blooded creature is safe from their thirst. Now, as darkness gathers, the sky is filled with the frantic motion, the maddening murmur of…Nightwing.

A disgruntled, disenfranchised Hopi shaman sets out to "end the world" by way of a ritual invocation of the Hopi god of death. Shortly after his mutilated corpse is discovered by a skeptical Tewa deputy the body count begins to rise as more strangely slashed and bloodied victims are found. The book has many elements: part love triangle; part Native American case study; part supernatural thriller. It was the author's own tribal ancestry which inspired the writing of this fictionalized anthropological mini-survey. It was adapted into the 1979 film with the same title, directed by Arthur Hiller.