Unlike Tony Hillerman's popular detective fiction set in the American Southwest, Finding Moon is set primarily in Southeast Asia. The change in setting points to a change in Hillerman's interests, and the novel addresses several social concerns new to his work. The main character, Malcolm Mathias (nicknamed Moon due to a childhood passion for Moon Pies) finds his life influenced by powerful contemporary social forces.

One of these is the poor state of health care in America due to the incompetence of some doctors. When Moon was a teenager in Oklahoma, his father suffered from a lung disorder, which the doctors at the local hospital misdiagnosed as pneumonia. The illness turned out to be tuberculosis, but this fact was not discovered until the disease had spread to the father's spinal column, paralyzing him from the neck down. Moon watched his mother nurse his father until it...