This mystery is the second one published by Hillerman, after his first mystery set in Navajo country, The Blessing Way.In the Fly on the Wall, John Cotton is a statehouse reporter and has just filed his story when a colleague comes into the pressroom. Merrill McDaniels, known as Mac, comes into f...
I got the book from the local library to read the Cornell Woolrich story "Rear Window," the basis for the Hitchcock movie of the same name. I won't do the usual and say the book is better than the movie. I hate it when people do that—the book (short-story) was different than the movie. Each can s...
Had it not been for some unfortunate connotations that I had with Hillerman (he was the author of choice for a particularly Wicked Stepmother), I would have most likely read his whole oeuvre by now. When he died earlier this year, I decided to make like a good Southwesterner and rectify this omis...
A skeleton is discovered 1,700 feet above the base of a sacred mountain in the four corners Indian reservation. Joe Leaphorn comes out of retirement to help investigate the case, believed to be the rich Anglo named Hal Breedlove who fell while trying to climb Ship Rock eleven years earlier. The L...
Sacred Clowns is truly Tony Hillerman at his best. Both Leaphorn and Chee are at a personal crossroad in their lives while attempting to solve two crimes which may or may not be related. A complex mystery is interwoven with the care befitting a sacred blanket as we learn about the Navajo and thei...
Tony Hillerman created an entire genre with these novels, and though they've been copied, no one has ever quite found the blend of Native American beliefs and traditions and modern-day mystery Hillerman perfected. Visiting Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee in the pages of a Hillerman mystery is the next ...
Plus d'un an entre le premier tome de Hillerman et ce deuxième tome, Dance Hall of the Dead, dérogeant ainsi à mon habitude terriblement chronophage de dévorer au moins quelques tomes consécutifs d'une séries en quelques jours. Je ne comprend pas ce qui s'est passé. Il semble cependant que ce soi...
A man is found shot dead in his truck at the end of a dry wash. There are only the tire tracks of his pickup truck going in. Nothing, not even footsteps coming back out. So who is he and how did he get there? Why was he killed? Sargent Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police is reunited with legenda...
Tony Hillerman has once again created a fresh and involving entry in his fine series about the Navajo Tribal Police. In this one, the retired Leaphorn is at loose ends after the death of his beloved wife, Emma. Chee, meanwhile, has become acting Lieutenant, but is experiencing reservations over t...
Navajo Tribal Police Sergeant Jim Chee is asked by Rosemary Vines, the wife of B.J. Vines, one of the richest men in New Mexico, to find a box of her husband's keepsakes that has been stolen. Chee doesn't know if he will take the job, but his curiosity is further piqued when the local Sheriff, a...
319 pages of excellent storytelling, without sex or excess violence. The main character is a small-town newspaper worker from Colorado who is suddenly thrust into the final days of the Vietnam war by his dead brother. Moon Mathias is a Vietnam veteran who has his life back in order, or so he thin...
Those looking for a great mystery series who have yet to discover Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee are in for a treat with Skinwalkers. Tony Hillerman created an entire genre with these novels, and though they've been copied, no one has ever quite found the blend of Native American beliefs and tradition...
You know how actors and people in some other fields get "lifetime achievement awards," and sometimes they get an Oscar not so much for the movie for which they are ostensibly getting the Oscar, but because they have been around a long time and everyone loves them and they're probably not gonna tu...
There are a lot of things to like about this book, which is my first Hillerman experience, but I think my favorites were the characters. This is not the first book in the series, and I was a little confused for the first couple of pages, but it didn’t take long for me to warm to the very human c...
Good old-fashioned crime novel set primarily in southwestern New Mexico involving murder, border issues, corrupt local cops and federal politicians, drug smuggling, etc. The main protagonists are folks you can root for, and the bad guys are, well, you'll have to read the book. Hillerman is a go...
The backdrop of the book starts with the Federal government giving some Navajo land to the Hopis and forcing some 9,000 Navajos off their land. The Navajos had been hauling water in this arid stretch by hand. After the government took this piece of land from the Navajos, they constructed eight wi...
THE BLESSING WAY was Tony Hillerman's first novel. Although Navajo police officer Joe Leaphorn appears in the book, he is a secondary character. The main character is Bergen McKee, a tenured professor with expertise in the social context of Navajo witchcraft. McKee is still recovering from his di...
With Tony Hillerman's "Hunting Badger," I'm beginning to wonder if this is the onset of the series sailing over the Selachimorpha. There are three things in the book that worry me. First, as a trivial thing near the beginning, we've got this:"The little hatch Chee had cut into the bottom of the t...
I read this many years ago, when it first came out in 1990, and have just re-read it, as I am reading a series of other southwestern-themed mysteries and I wanted to see if Hillerman’s stories held up against both time and the newer stories. The answer is yes, it did – it held up well against bo...
It sprawls over forty square miles east of Gallup adjoining transcontinental rail lines, old Highway 66 and Interstate 40, causing generations of passing tourists to wonder about the miles of immense bunkers. These once sheltered thousands of tons of bombs, rockets, and missiles, but now they are...
Leaphorn said. Goddard nodded. “OK, I promise.” “Stein also worked a lot in the Middle East. In Yemen, for example, and in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Oil field and pipeline stuff, officially,” Goddard said. “But most likely with ...