Welcome! The Beat in association with Amazon.com brings you these mystery
books by Tony Hillerman! To learn more about or to order one of the following
books, just click on the book's title.
To Officer Bernadette Manuelito, the man curled up on the truck seat was
just another drunk -- which got Bernie in trouble for mishandling a crime
scene -- which got Sergeant Jim Chee in trouble with the FBI -- which
drew Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn out of retirement and back into the old "Golden
Calf" homicide, a case he had hoped to forget.
Nothing had seemed complicated about that earlier one. A con game had
gone sour. A swindler had tried to sell wealthy old Wiley Denton the location
of one of the West's multitude of legendary lost gold mines. Denton had
shot the swindler, called the police, confessed the homicide, and done
his short prison time. No mystery there.
Except why did the rich man's bride vanish? The cynics said she was part
of the swindle plot. She'd fled when it failed. But, alas, old Joe Leaphorn
was a romantic. He believed in love, and thus the Golden Calf case still
troubled him. Now, papers found in this new homicide case connect the
victim to Denton and to the mythical Golden Calf Mine. The first Golden
Calf victim had been there just hours before Denton killed him. And while
Denton was killing him, four children trespassing among the rows of empty
bunkers in the long-abandoned Wingate Ordnance Depot called in an odd
report to the police. They had heard, in the wind wailing around the old
buildings, what sounded like music and the cries of a woman.
Bernie Manuelito uses her knowledge of Navajo country, its tribal traditions,
and her friendship with a famous old medicine man to unravel the first
knot of this puzzle, with Jim Chee putting aside his distaste of the FBI
to help her. But the questions raised by this second Golden Calf murder
aren't answered until Leaphorn solves the puzzle left by the first one
and discovers what the young trespassers heard in the wailing wind.
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 hot-headed
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.
Amazon Readers say ... "As any true Hillerman fan will
conclude, however, any new novel featuring Chee and Leaphorn in the
four corners vistas starts out, per se, almost as good as it gets; so
even a lesser performance is still thoroughly enjoyed. I now join the
thousands of other fans who are anxiously awaiting the next in the series."
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Tony Hillerman
Past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received
their Edgar and Grand Master awards. His other honors include the
Center for the American Indian's Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur
Award for best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe's Special
Friend Award. He lives with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, NM.
The Blessing Way
by Tony Hillerman,Paperback - 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. Rumors of witchcraft and the
supernatural are nothing new to Lt. Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal
Police. He and anthropologist Bergen McKee had stalked the Wolf-Witch
before. Always it had eluded them, vanishing like a ghost on the wind.
But never had it left such a horrifying trail of murder. For Lt. Leaphorn,
the case was a baffling challenge to his logic. For Bergen McKee, it was
a problem of academic concern. Now, no longer is tracking the Navajo Wolf
simply a challenge - now it's a matter of life and death.
Hunting Badger
by Tony Hillerman,Paperback - Three armed men raid the Ute tribe's
gambling casino, and then disappear in the maze of canyons on the Utah-Arizona
border. The FBI takes over the investigation, and agents swarm in with
helicopters and high-tech equipment. Making an explosive situation even
hotter, these experts devise a theory of the crime that makes a wounded
deputy sheriff a suspect -- a development that brings in Tribal Police
Sergeant Jim Chee and his longtime colleague, retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn
to help. Chee finds a fatal flaw in the federal theory and Leaphorn sees
an intriguing pattern connecting this crime with the exploits of a legendary
Ute hero bandit. Balancing politics, outsiders, and missing armed fugitives,
Leaphorn and Chee soon find themselves caught in the most perplexing --
and deadly -- crime hunt of their lives....
Amazon readers say ... "Hunting Badger is a worthy addition to Hillerman's
already strong collection of mysteries. Although at the beginning of the
book the mystery doesn't seem to be terribly mysterious, the plot twists
a few times and is very satisfying by the end. But superceding the plot,
and for the first time superceding the Navajo culture, is the character
development of the two heros, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. It is high praise
indeed that we care more about the characters than about the outcome of
the manhunt..."
The Fly on the Wall
by Tony Hillerman, Paperback - John Cotton was a simple man with one
desire: to write the greatest story of his life and have enough life left
to read all about it. Reporter John Cotton knows what to do when he finds
a great story, but he is a little afraid when a big story begins to find
him. It starts when a fellow reporter is murdered and his notebook, filled
with information about a tax scam, ends up in John's hands. Not long afterwards,
a body is discovered in John's car. Then John's car ends up in the river,
a bomb is found in his apartment, and his girlfriend drops out of sight.
It's up to John to unravel the mystery of the notebook and why anyone
would kill for the information it contains.
Coyote Waits
by Tony Hillerman, Paperback
(A Sgt. Jim Chee & Lt. Leaphorn Mystery.) - Amazon readers say "Right
from the moment where a car fire on a dirt road announces trouble with
a capital "T," I enjoyed "Coyote Waits" a lot. Hillerman's pace is measured
but not sleep-inducing. It was fascinating to see two policemen work in
different ways to solve the same crime."
Finding
Moon
by Tony Hillerman, Paperback - 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.
Dance Hall of the Dead
by Tony Hillerman, Paperback. - Amazon readers say "...the perfect
book for the murder mystery lover ... The book was so great that I could
not put it down until I learned what happened next ...
Best
of the West
by Tony Hillerman, Paperback. - A sterling collection of classic
and contemporary fiction and nonfiction evoking the unique spirit of the
West and its people, selected and introduced by one of today's premier
chroniclers of the Western landscape and a New York Times bestselling
author.
The Dark Wind
by Tony Hillerman, Paperback - A corpse in the desert-its face unidentifiable,
its hands and feet flayed ... A mysterious plane crash and a missing cache
of cocaine ... Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police had no business
meddling in these matters. His assignment is simple: discover who is sabotaging
a windmill on land recently ceded over to the Hopis. But his extraordinary
tracking skills and genius for sleuthing will lead him deep into the remote
washes and isolated mesas where the Hopis hold their most secret ceremonies,
trapping him in a deadly web of intrigue driven by Navajo sorcery and
white man's greed.
Amazon readers say ... "I've read this book twice now, and I would
have to say that it is definitely one of Hillerman's better ones. I love
the way Hillerman has characterized Chee with very simple sentences, reminiscent
of Hemingway. They make Chee seem like a very uncomplicated, spiritual
man, and a very thoughtful person ..."
Ghostway
by Tony Hillerman, Paperback - When the Federal Witness Protection
Program sends a felon to the Navajo "Big Reservation" without informing
the Tribal Police, the results is a chain of treachery and killings that
the FBI lacks the knowledge to solve. After a shootout between two strangers
at the Shiprock Wash-O-Mat, Officer Jim Chee is called in to help. The
routine search for a missing Navajo girl snares Chee into a puzzle that
lures him across the America West to the forbidden underside of LosAngeles--and
to a healing ceremonial where the cure may turn out to be death.
The Listening Woman
by Tony Hillerman, Paperback
(A Sgt. Jim Chee Mystery) - 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.
People of Darkness
by Tony Hillerman, Paperback. (A Sgt. Jim Chee Mystery.) - Amazon
readers say ... "The mystery involves the attempted murder of a dying
man, the disappearance of his corpse from the hospital morgue, a uranium
mine, a fatal oil-well explosion 30 years earlier, and the theft of a
keepsake box filled mostly with black rocks. This novel has the distinction
of featuring the scariest, most chilling villain of the series ..."
Sacred Clowns
by Tony Hillerman, Paperback
(A Sgt. Jim Chee & Lt. Leaphorn Mystery) - First there was the trouble
at Saint Bonaventure boarding school. A teacher is dead, a boy is missing,
and a councilwoman has put a lot of pressure on Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn
and Officer Jim Chee -to find her grandson. Sitting on a rooftop watching
sacred clowns perform their antics in a Puebla ceremonial, Chee spots
the boy. Then, suddenly, the crowd is in commotion. One of the clowns
has been savagely murdered. Without a single due, On and Leophorn must
follow a serpentine trail through the Indian dons and nations, seekig
the thread that links two brutal murders, a missing teenager, a bond of
lobbyists trying to put a toxic dump site on Pueblo land, and an invaluable
memento given to the tribes by Abraham Lincoln in a fast-paced, flawless
mystery that is Hillerman at his lyrical evocative, spellbinding best.
Skinwalkers
by Tony Hillerman,Paperback .
(A Sgt. Jim Chee & Lt. Leaphorn Mystery.) - Navajo Tribal Police
Officer Jim Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn investigate murders that
lead them into spine-tingling and mystical world of Navajo witchcraft.
Three unsolved homicides and an attempt on Chee's life have left the Navajo
Tribal Police baffled. Are the murders somehow connected, although they
occurred 120 miles apart? Or are they random acts of violence? Chee and
Leaphorn's efforts to solve the seemingly unrelated individual crimes
leave them with clues that point toward one suspect, in this suspenseful
mystery.
Talking God
by Tony Hillerman, Paperback.
(A Sgt. Jim Chee & Lt. Leaphorn Mystery ...New York Times Bestseller...)
Master storyteller Tony Hillerman reunited Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer
Jim Chee in an intricately woven mystery involving two seemingly unrelated
cases--one about grave robbing to protest a museum's policy of not returning
ancestral remains to Native Americans . . . the other concerning a murder
victim whose body has been carefully stripped of identification. . .
The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other Indian Country Affairs
by Tony Hillerman, Paperback - 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, true tales
that capture the history and rhythms of daily life in New Mexico. From
the comical title story of the holdup that didn't happen, to the riveting
account of scientist tracking the Black Death through the arroyos in "We
All Fall Down," to the ironic account of how a Black cowboy's commonsense
intelligence destroyed the dogma of the Smithsonian Institution in "Othello
in Union County," master storyteller Tony Hillerman reveals the present
and the timeless past of one of America's most beautiful and haunting
regions.
Information, Reviews and More!
Anasazi Heritage
Center
A museum of the Ancestral Puebloan (or Anasazi) culture
and other Native cultures in the Four Corners region.
Archaeological Sites of the Southwest
A catalog of prehistoric archaeological sites in the "Four-Corners"
states
(Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico) of the American Southwest
that are on public land and are legally open to visitation.
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The
Wailing Wind