Books with author Tony Hillerman

From New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman comes another unforgettable mystery in which Leaphorn & Chee must race against the clock to solve two brutal murders. “[Hillerman's] clowns are . . . every bit as raucous, profane, and funny as Shakespeare's."―New York Times Book ReviewDuring a kachina ceremony at the Tano Pueblo, the antics of a dancing koshare fill the air with tension. Moments later, the clown is found bludgeoned to death, in the same manner a reservation schoolteacher was killed only days before. Officer Jim Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn believe that answers lie in the sacred clown's final cryptic message to the Tano people. But to decipher it, the two Navajo policemen may have to delve into closely guarded tribal secrets―on a sinister trail of blood that links a runaway, a holy artifact, corrupt Indian traders, and a pair of dead bodies.

Do the mysteries of an ancient Indian civilization hold the key to solving the baffling disappearance of a noted anthropologist?Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn teams with Officer Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police to try to find out. But the case turns more and more sinister. And a series of mystifying murders... each more bizarre than the one before it... makes finding the missing Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal... if she is still alive... an urgent race against time.

When Tony Hillerman looks back at seventy-six years spent getting from hard-times 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 in World War II, 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 twenty-four languages around the world. In this wry and whimsical memoir, Hillerman offers frequent backward glances at where he found ideas for the plots of his books and the characters who inhabit them. For example, there's the way flushing a solitary heron from a sandbar caused him to convert Joe Leaphorn from husband to widower. 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. We get a good-natured trip through hard times in college, a colorful infantry career, and, afterward, work as truck driver, chain dragger, journalist, professor, and "doer of undignified deeds" for two university presidents. All this is colored by his love affair (now in its fifty-fourth year) with Marie, which involved raising six children, most of them adopted.

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 nearly filled with tracer gold. It's her initial mishandling of the scene that spell trouble for her supervisor, Sgt. 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.