Best Selling Books by Tony Hillerman

When two corpses appear amid stolen goods and bones at an ancient burial site, Leaphorn and Chee must plunge into the past to unearth the truth.

Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+! “Brilliant…as fascinating as it is original.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch From New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman, the first novel in his series featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn & Officer Jim Chee who encounter a bizarre case that borders between the supernatural and murder Homicide is always an abomination, but there is something exceptionally disturbing about the victim discovered in a high, lonely place—a corpse with a mouth full of sand—abandoned at a crime scene seemingly devoid of tracks or useful clues. Though it goes against his better judgment, Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn cannot help but suspect the hand of a supernatural killer. There is palpable evil in the air, and Leaphorn''s pursuit of a Wolf-Witch leads him where even the bravest men fear, on a chilling trail that winds perilously between mysticism and murder.

Story Collection: Skinwalkers--A Thief of Time--Talking God.

The state police and FBI are baffled when an old man and a teenage girl are brutally murdered. The blind Navajo Listening Woman speaks of ghosts and of witches. But Lieutenant Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police knows his people as well as he knows cold-blooded killers. His incredible investigation carries him from a dead man''s secret to a kidnap scheme, to a conspiracy that stretches back more than one hundred years. Leaphorn arrives at the threshold of a solution—and is greeted with the most violent confrontation of his career.

Contains The Blessing Way, Dance Hall of the Dead and Listening Woman. This copy does not contain Talking God, A Thief of Time and Skinwalkers.

This classic collection of nonfiction essays about life in New Mexico by the great Tony Hillerman remains a must read for anyone looking to understand the state''s unique charm. The vivid pieces in The Great Taos Bank Robbery paint an indelible portrait of life--with all its magnificent quirks and foibles--in the Land of Enchantment. Celebrating fifty years since its original 1973 release, this anniversary edition offers a new introduction by noted Hillerman biographer James McGrath Morris and a foreword by Anne Hillerman, introducing a new generation of readers to the magic of Tony Hillerman and New Mexico.

Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+! “For the many enthusiastic fans of Tony Hillerman’s previous mystery novels . . . only one thing needs to be said: Talking God is the best one yet!” — USA Today From New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman, Talking God is the ninth novel featuring beloved characters Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Office Jim Chee Reunited by a grave robber and a corpse, Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is trying to determine the identity of a murder victim, while Officer Jim Chee is arresting Smithsonian conservator Henry Highhawk for ransacking the sacred bones of his ancestors. But with each peeled-back layer, it becomes shockingly clear that these two cases are mysteriously connected—and that others are pursuing Highhawk, with lethal intentions. And the search for answers to a deadly puzzle is pulling Leaphorn and Chee into the perilous arena of superstition, ancient ceremony, and living gods.

Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+! “Hillerman . . . is in a class by himself.”— Los Angeles Times The fourth novel in New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman’s highly acclaimed Leaphorn and Chee series. A dying man is murdered. A rich man’s wife agrees to pay three thousand dollars for the return of a stolen box of rocks. A series of odd, inexplicable events is haunting Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police and drawing him alone into the Bad Country of the merciless Southwest, where everything good struggles to survive, including Chee. Because an assassin waits for him there, protecting a thirty-year-old vision that greed has sired and blood has nourished. And only one man will walk away.

When Tony Hillerman looks back at seventy-six years spent getting from hardtimes farm boy to bestselling author, he sees lots of evidence that Providence was poking him along. For example, when an absentminded Army clerk left him off the hospital ship taking the wounded home from France, the mishap put him on a collision course with a curing ceremony held for two Navajo Marines, thereby providing the grist for a writing career that now sees his books published in sixteen languages around the world and often on bestseller lists. Or, for example, when his agent told him his first novel was so bad that it would hurt both of their reputations, he nonetheless sent it to an editor, and that editor happened to like the Navajo stuff. In this wry and whimsical memoir, Hillerman offers frequent backward glances at where he found ideas for plots of his books and the characters that inhabit them. He takes us with him to death row, where he interviews a man about to die in the gas chamber and details how this murderer became Colton Wolf in one of his novels. He relates how flushing a solitary heron from a sandbar caused him to convert Joe Leaphorn from husband to widower, and how his self-confessed bias against the social elite solved the key plot problem in A Thief of Time. No child abuse stories here: The worst Hillerman can recall is being sent off to first grade (in a boarding school for Indian girls) clad in cute blue coveralls instead of the manly overalls his farm-boy peers all wore. Instead we get a good-natured trip through hard times in college; an infantry career in which he "rose twice to Private First Class" and also won a Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart; and, afterward, work as a truck driver, chain dragger, journalist, professor, and "doer of undignified deeds" for two university presidents. All this is colored by a love affair (now in its fifty-fourth year) with Marie, which involved raising six children, most of them adopted. Using the gifts of a talented novelist and reporter, seventy-six-year-old Tony Hillerman draws a brilliant portrait not just of his life but of the world around him.

Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+! “With The Shape Shifter, Hillerman once again proves himself the master of Southwest mystery fiction, working in a Hemingway-esque tradition of pared-down writing to bring the rugged Southwest into focus.”—Santa Fe New Mexican Legendary Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is drawn back into the past to solve a cold case that has haunted him for nearly a decade in this atmospheric and twisting mystery infused with the Native American culture and lore of the desert Southwest. Though he’s officially retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, Joe Leaphorn occasionally helps his former colleagues Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito crack particularly puzzling crimes. But there is that rare unsolved investigation that haunts every lawman, including the legendary Leaphorn. Joe still hasn’t let go of his “last case”—a mystery involving a priceless Navajo rug that was supposedly destroyed in a fire. Nine years later, what looks like the same one-of-a-kind rug turns up in a magazine spread, and the man who showed Joe the photo has gone missing. With Chee and Bernie on their honeymoon, Leaphorn plunges into the case solo, picking up the threads of this crime he’d long thought impossible to solve. Not only has the passage of time obscured the details, but a murderer long thought dead continues to roam free—and is ready to strike again to keep the past buried.

Explores the life and work of Tony Hillerman, including the author''s reflections on his childhood, a discussion of his artistic technique, and a short story.

Investigating the discovery of a skeleton at one of the holiest places in Navajo religion, Jim Chee and the newly retired Joe Leaphorn realize that the body is that of a missing person from one of Joe''s long-unsolved past cases.

Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+! From a brilliant new voice comes a brilliant new epic fantasy saga of war, prophecy, betrayal, history, and destiny. When Acting Lt. Jim Chee catches a Hopi poacher huddled over a butchered Navajo Tribal police officer, he has an open-and-shut case—until his former boss, Joe Leaphorn, blows it wide open. Now retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, Leaphorn has been hired to find a hotheaded female biologist hunting for the key to a virulent plague lurking in the Southwest. The scientist disappeared from the same area the same day the Navajo cop was murdered. Is she a suspect or another victim? And what about a report that a skinwalker—a Navajo witch—was seen at the same time and place too? For Leaphorn and Chee, the answers lie buried in a complicated knot of superstition and science, in a place where the worlds of native peoples and outside forces converge and collide.

Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+! The fifth novel in Tony Hillerman''s iconic Leaphorn and Chee mystery series The corpse had been “scalped,” its palms and soles removed after death. Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police knows immediately he will have his hands full with this case, a certainty that is supported by the disturbing occurrences to follow. A mysterious nighttime plane crash, a vanishing shipment of cocaine, and a bizarre attack on a windmill only intensify Chee’s fears. A dark and very ill wind is blowing through the Southwestern desert, a gale driven by Navajo sorcery and white man’s greed. And it will sweep away everything unless Chee can somehow change the weather.

Don’t Miss the AMC television series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, coming this summer! From New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman, Skinwalkers is the seventh novel featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee—a riveting tale of sorcery, secrets, and murder. Three shotgun blasts rip through the side of Officer Jim Chee’s trailer as the Navajo Tribal Policeman sleeps. He survives, but the inexplicable attack has raised disturbing questions about a lawman once beyond reproach. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn wonders why Chee was a target and what connection the assault has to a series of gruesome murders that has been plaguing the reservation. But the investigation is leading them both into a nightmare of ritual, witchcraft, and blood . . . and into the dark and mystical domain of evil beings of Navajo legend, the “skinwalkers.”

Hailed as "a wonderful storyteller" by the New York Times, and a "national and literary cultural sensation" by the Los Angeles Times, bestselling author Tony Hillerman is back with another blockbuster novel featuring the legendary Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee. Former Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn comes out of retirement to help investigate what seems to be a trading post robbery. A simple-minded kid nailed for the crime is the cousin of an old colleague of Sergeant Jim Chee. He needs help and Chee, and his fiancée Bernie Manuelito, decide to provide it. Proving the kid''s innocence requires finding the remains of one of 172 people whose bodies were scattered among the cliffs of the Grand Canyon in an epic airline disaster 50 years in the past. That passenger had handcuffed to his wrist an attaché case filled with a fortune in—one of which seems to have turned up in the robbery. But with Hillerman, it can''t be that simple. The daughter of the long-dead diamond dealer is also seeking his body. So is a most unpleasant fellow willing to kill to make sure she doesn''t succeed. These two tense tales collide deep in the canyon at the place where an old man died trying to build a cult reviving reverence for the Hopi guardian of the Underworld. It''s a race to the finish in a thunderous monsoon storm to see who will survive, who will be brought to justice, and who will finally unearth the Skeleton Man.

From its wry politics to its astonishing history, to the hypnotic rhythms of daily life, here is the New Mexico you''ve never seen but will come to love.

Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee hunt for three survivalist gunmen who robbed a Ute casino.

Two young boys suddenly disappear. One of them, a Zuni, leaves a pool of blood behind. Lt. Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police tracks the brutal killer. Three things complicate the search: an archeological dig, a steel hypodermic needle, and the strange laws of the Zuni. Compelling, terrifying, and highly suspenseful, "Dance Hall of the Dead" never relents from first page til last.

Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn investigate a crime that involves the murder of a Pueblo tribal official, the death of a schoolteacher, and the disappearance of a tribal memento.

Tony Hillerman''s bestselling Navajo mysteries have thrilled millions of readers with their taut, intricate plotting, sensitive, subtle characterizations and lyrical evocations of landscapes and cultures. Now he departs his trademark terrain and applies his talents to a story he has wanted to tell for decades about an ordinary man thrust into total chaos. Until the telephone call came for him on April 12, 1975, the world of Moon Mathias had settled into a predictable routine. He knew who he was. He was the disappointing son of Victoria Mathias, the brother of the brilliant, recently dead Ricky Mathias and a man who could be counted on to solve small problems. But the telephone caller was an airport security officer, and the news he delivered handed Moon a problem as large as Southeast Asia. His mother, who should be in her Florida apartment, is fighting for her life in a Los Angeles hospital -- stricken while en route to the Philippines to bring home a grandchild they hadn''t known existed. The papers in her purse send Moon into a world totally strange to him. They lure him down the back streets of Manila, to a rural cockfight, into the odd Filipino prison on Palawan Island and finally across the South China Sea to where Pol Pot''s Khmer Rouge is turning Cambodia into killing fields and Communist rockets are beginning to fall on the outskirts of Saigon. Finding Moon is many things: a latter-day adventure epic, a deftly orchestrated romance, an arresting portrait of an exotic realm engulfed in turmoil, and a neatly turned tale of suspense. Most of all, it is a singular story of how a plain, uncertain man finds his best self.

Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+! The sixth installment in New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman''s Leaphorn and Chee series—an electrifying thriller of revenge, secrets, and murder. “One of the best of the series.”—New York Times Book Review Old Joseph Joe sees it all. Two strangers spill blood at the Shiprock Wash-O-Mat. One dies. The other drives off into the dry lands of the Big Reservation, but not before he shows the old Navajo a photo of the man he seeks. This is all Tribal Policeman Jim Chee needs to set him off on an odyssey that moves from a trapped ghost in an Indian hogan to the seedy underbelly of L.A. to an ancient healing ceremony where death is the cure, and into the dark heart of murder and revenge.

Hot on the heels of his huge bestseller, The Wailing Wind, Tony Hillerman brings back Chee and Leaphorn in a puzzling new mystery The body of a well-dressed fellow, all identification missing, is found hidden under the brush on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation. The local FBI takes over from the Navajo Police Sergeant Jim Chee, and quickly has the case snatched all the way to Washington. Washington proves uncooperative and the case is deadended. When Joe Leaphorn, the “legendary lieutenant” of Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police discovers that Washington officials hid the body’s identity, lines surprisingly connect to the case he’s working on at exotic game ranch. A photograph she sends him tells Chee she is facing a danger he doesn’t understand. Hillerman produces a galaxy of unusual characters in this compelling novel that is sure to confound readers until the very last page.

Officer Bernadette Manuelito found the dead man slumped over in the cab of a blue pickup abandoned in a dry gulch off a dirt road, with a rich ex-con''s phone number in his pocket . . . and a tobacco tin nearby filled with tracer gold. It''s her initial mishandling of the scene that spells trouble for her supervisor, Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, but it''s the echoes of a long-ago crime that call the legendary former Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn out of retirement. Years earlier, Leaphorn followed the trail of a beautiful, young, and missing wife to a dead end, and his failure has haunted him ever since. But ghosts never sleep in these high, lonely Southwestern hills. And the twisted threads of craven murders past and current may finally be coming together, thanks to secrets once moaned in torment on the desert wind.

An investigation of the murder of a tribal policeman leads to a historical find worth a fortune.

As readers of Tony Hillerman''s detective novels know, he is a skilled interpreter of southwestern Indian cultures. In this book, first published in 1972, he recounts a Zuni myth first recorded a century ago by the anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing. Hillerman''s version of the story, written to be read by children ten years old and up, will have equal appeal for adults with an interest in Native American culture. "In our society," Hillerman explains, "this would be called a ''Bible story.'' Like stories based on the Old Testament, this narrative is intended to teach both the history and morality of a people." It tells the consequences of a drought in which Zuni crops were ruined and the tribe was forced to accept charity from neighboring Hopis.

Ace reporter John Cotton is a fly on the wall -- seeing all, hearing all, and keeping out of sight. But the game changes when he finds his best friend''s corpse sprawled on the marble floor of the central rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Suddenly Cotton knows too much about a scandal centered around a senatorial candidate, a million-dollar scam, and a murder. And he hears the pursuing footsteps of powerful people who have something to hide ... and a willingness to kill to keep their secrets hidden.

Three classic Hillerman mysteries.