Prayer of the Dragon — Eliot Pattison

Shan Tao Yun is an exiled Chinese national, a former Beijing investigator, on parole from the Tibetan work camp to which he had been consigned as punishment. Summoned to a remote village to save a comatose man from summary execution for two murders, Shan discovers that the unconscious suspect is not Tibetan, but Navajo, and that the recent murders are only part of a chain of deaths. To find the killer, Shan must solve the riddle of Dragon Mountain, the place "where world begins."