Tony Hillerman

Author Information
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  • Bibliography:
    26 Books
  • First Book:
    March 1970
  • Latest Book:
    November 2006
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About the Author

Anthony Grove Hillerman was an American author of detective novels and nonfiction works best known for his mystery novels featuring Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Several of his works have been adapted as theatrical and television movies.

Multi-Author Series List

A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery

Chee's Witch (Dec-1999)
1 - The Blessing Way (Mar-1970)
2 - Dance Hall of the Dead (1973)
3 - Listening Woman (1978)
4 - People of Darkness (Sep-1980)
5 - The Dark Wind (Mar-1982)
6 - The Ghostway (Feb-1985)
7 - Skinwalkers (Nov-1986)
8 - A Thief of Time (Jun-1988)
9 - Talking God (Jun-1989)
10 - Coyote Waits (Oct-1990)
11 - Sacred Clowns (Oct-1993)
12 - The Fallen Man (Nov-1996)
13 - The First Eagle (Jul-1998)
14 - Hunting Badger (Nov-1999)
15 - The Wailing Wind (May-2002)
16 - The Sinister Pig (May-2003)
17 - Skeleton Man (Nov-2004)
18 - The Shape Shifter (Nov-2006)

Book List in Order: 26 titles

  • The Blessing Way

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 1

    WOLF-WITCH MURDERS... High on the desolate mesa they found the body. The mouth was filled with sand ... No tracks, no clues. Every Navajo knew that nothing human killed like that. Lt. Joe Leaphorn and anthropologist Bergen McKee had stalked the...

  • Dance Hall of the Dead

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 2

    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...

  • Listening Woman

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 3

    Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+!“Hillerman’s mysteries are special . . . Listening Woman is among the best.” -- Washington PostThe third novel in New York Times b...

  • People of Darkness

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 4

    DEATH VISION... The old Indian was already dying when someone tried to murder him. A box stolen from a rich man's house was filled only with rocks--but that man's wife offered Sgt. Jim Chee $3,000 to get it back. Out in the Bad Country under th...

  • The Dark Wind

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 5

    SNOW KILLS... The vast Indian-owned lands of the Southwest held mysteries the white man's logic could not solve. A dead man's boots left on a dusty trail. A bloody corpse with the palms and soles sliced off. A low-flying plane circling in the nigh...

  • The Ghostway

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 6

    A KILLING SPIRIT Old Joseph Joe witnessed the shoot-out between two strangers at the Shiprock Wash-O-Mat. One died. The other drove off into the dry lands of the Big Reservation. But not before he had given Old Joe a look at a Polaroid of the man ...

  • Skinwalkers

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 7

    Three shotgun blasts explode into the trailer of Officer Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police. But Chee survives to join partner Lt. Joe Leaphorn in a frightening investigation that takes them into a dark world of ritual, witchcraft, and blood -- all...

  • A Thief of Time

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 8

    A noted anthropologist vanishes at a moonlit Indian ruin where "thieves of time" ravage sacred ground for profit. When two corpses appear amid stolen goods and bones at an ancient burial site, Navajo Tribal Policemen Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim ...

  • Talking God

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 9

    A grave robber and a corpse reunite Navajo Tribal Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee. As Leaphorn seeks the identity of a murder victim, Chee is arresting Smithsonian conservator Henry Highhawk for ransacking the sacred bones of his ancesto...



  • The Fly on the Wall

    John Cotton was a fly on the wall--the perfect reporter, seeing it all, hearing it all, but never being noticed. His best friend wasn't so lucky. He saw and heard too much and the last time John saw him, he was lying dead outside the Capitol. But dea...

  • Coyote Waits

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 10

    The car fire didn't kill Navajo Tribal Policeman Delbert Nez, a bullet did. Officer Jim Chee's good friend Del lies dead, and a whiskey-soaked Navajo shaman is found with the murder weapon. The old man is Ashie Pinto. He's quickly arrested for homici...

  • The Boy Who Made Dragonfly

    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 Cus...

  • Sacred Clowns

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 11

    AN ANCIENT TRUST IS BROKEN During a Tano kachin ceremony something in the antics of the dancing kosbare fills the air with tension. Moments later the clown is found brutally bludgeoned in the same manner that a reservation schoolteacher was killed...

  • Finding Moon

    THE SEARCH BEGINS One phone call in 1975 changes Moon Mathias's predictable life forever. His dead brother's baby daughter is waiting for him in Southeast Asia--a child Moon didn't know existed. Moon considers finding her in the aftermath of wa...

  • The Mysterious West

    Edited by Tony Hillerman, the Southwest's foremost suspense writer, this first-ever collection of mystery stories set in the West contains 20 original entries by such luminary mystery writers as Marcia Muller, Susan Dunlap, and Robert Campbell....

  • The Fallen Man

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 12

    Sprawled on a ledge under the peak of Ship Rock mountain for eleven years lies an unknown body, now only bones. At Canyon de Chelly, three hundred miles across the Navajo reservation, a sniper shoots an old canyon guide who had always walked that pol...

  • The Great Taos Bank Robbery: And Other True Stories of the Southwest

    For the very first time in mass market paperback, here is a unique compilation about life in New Mexico by one of the nation's finest writers.

    Tony Hillerman, who knows the Southwest like no other contemporary writer; presents nine extraordinary, t...

  • The First Eagle

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 13

    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...

  • Hunting Badger

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 14

    Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+!  The fourteenth novel featuring Leaphorn and Chee by New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman, now reissued in the Pre...



  • Chee's Witch

    in First Cases Volume 3
    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery

    Follow Tony Hillerman's Jim Chee as he investigates rumors of witchcraft in the steamy Southwest. Join Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan when she looks into a suspicious house fire in Baltimore. Compare the detecting tactics of Maxine O'Callaghan's pione...

  • The Wailing Wind

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 15

    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 initia...

  • The Sinister Pig

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 16

    The victim, well dressed but stripped of identification, is found at the edge of the vast Jicarilla Apache natural gas field just inside the jurisdiction of the Navajo Tribal Police, facing Sergeant Jim Chee with a complex puzzle. Why did the Was...

  • Skeleton Man

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 17

    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 an...

  • Buster Mesquite's Cowboy Band

    Buster Mesquite's Cowboy Band give a quirky southwestern retelling of a classic children's tale, with a much more satisfactory ending. Delightful illustrations by Navajo artist Ernest Franklin, who has been illustrating Tony Hillerman's Navajo police...

  • The Shape Shifter

    A Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn Mystery - 18

    Retirement has never sat well with former Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. Now the ghosts of a still- unsolved case are returning to haunt him, reawakened by a photograph in a magazine spread of a one-of-a-kind Navajo rug, a priceless wo...

  • The Wild West

    • / Historical
    • Buy Buy

    Enjoy the best of the Wild West in this outstanding collection of stories from Tony Hillerman to Max Brand. This new series includes Hillerman's "The Great Taos BankRobbery,"Max Brand's "Wine on the Desert," and Bret Harte's "The Ou tcast of Poker Fl...

Award-Winning Books by Tony Hillerman

Coyote Waits
1991 Nero Wolfe Award -- Novel
Dance Hall of the Dead
1974 Edgar Allan Poe Award -- Novel
The Mysterious West
1995 Anthony Award -- Short Stories/Collection
The Shape Shifter
2007 SPUR Award -- Short Novel
Skinwalkers
1987 SPUR Award -- Western Novel
1988 Anthony Award -- Novel
A Thief of Time
1989 Macavity Award -- Mystery Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Tony Hillerman has published 26 books.

Tony Hillerman does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, The Shape Shifter, was published in November 2006.

The first book by Tony Hillerman, The Blessing Way, was published in March 1970.

No. Tony Hillerman does not write books in series.
Multi-Author Series
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