Tony Hillerman Books in Order

Below is the complete list of Tony Hillerman books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.

Leaphorn & Chee Series
with Anne Hillerman

1. The Blessing Way (1970)
2. Dance Hall of the Dead (1973)
3. Listening Woman (1978)
4. People of Darkness (1980)
5. The Dark Wind (1982)
6. The Ghostway (1984)
7. Skinwalkers (1986)
8. A Thief of Time (1988)
9. Talking God (1989)
10. Coyote Waits (1990)
11. Sacred Clowns (1992)
12. The Fallen Man (1996)
13. The First Eagle (1998)
14. Hunting Badger (1999)
15. The Wailing Wind (2002)
16. The Sinister Pig (2003)
17. Skeleton Man (2004)
18. The Shape Shifter (2006)
19. Spider Woman’s Daughter (2013)
    (By Anne Hillerman)
20. Rock with Wings (2015)
    (By Anne Hillerman)
21. Song of the Lion (2017)
    (By Anne Hillerman)
22. Cave of Bones (2018)
    (By Anne Hillerman)
23. The Tale Teller (2019)
    (By Anne Hillerman)
24. Stargazer (2021)
    (By Anne Hillerman)
25. The Sacred Bridge (2022)
    (By Anne Hillerman)
26. The Way of the Bear (2023)
    (By Anne Hillerman)
27. Lost Birds (2024)
    (By Anne Hillerman)
28. Shadow of the Solstice (2025)
    (By Anne Hillerman)

Standalone Novels Series

1. The Fly on the Wall (1971)
2. Finding Moon (1995)

Short Story Collections Series

1. The Best of the West (1991)
2. The Mysterious West (1994)
3. The Great Taos Bank Robbery: And Other True Stories (2023)

Children’s Series

1. The Boy Who Made Dragonfly (1972)
2. Buster Mesquite’s Cowboy Band (2001)

Non-Fiction Series

1. The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other Indian Country Affairs (1973)
2. New Mexico, Rio Grande, and Other Essays (1975)
3. The Spell of New Mexico (1976)
4. Tony Hillerman’s Indian Country Map and Guide (1987)
5. Indian Country (1987)
6. Talking Mysteries: A Conversation With Tony Hillerman (1991)
   (With Ernie Bulow)
7. Hillerman Country (1991)
   (With Barney Hillerman)
8. Seldom Disappointed (2001)
9. Kilroy Was There (2004)

About Tony Hillerman

Tony Hillerman was one of the most important writers ever to connect crime fiction with place in a deep, lasting way. Born in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, in 1925, he later became closely associated with the American Southwest, especially New Mexico, and with the body of work that made his name: the novels featuring Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Hillerman’s official University of New Mexico archive emphasizes that his early schooling alongside Native American children shaped his lifelong respect for Native cultures, and that background became central to the fiction that defined his career.

What made Hillerman stand out was not simply that he wrote mysteries set in the Southwest. He wrote novels in which landscape, belief, custom, and jurisdiction were not decorative features but part of how the mysteries actually worked. In the Leaphorn and Chee books, understanding the land and the cultural world surrounding the crime is often as important as any physical clue. Joe Leaphorn tends to approach cases with a practical, rational, often skeptical intelligence, while Jim Chee brings a different sensibility, one shaped more openly by Navajo tradition and spiritual knowledge. That contrast gave Hillerman one of the richest detective pairings in modern crime fiction.

His bibliography is best understood through that series, but Hillerman’s career was broader than many readers realize. He was a journalist before he became widely known as a novelist, later taught journalism at the University of New Mexico, and also wrote nonfiction about the Southwest, memoir, and other fiction. His official biography and public reference material consistently present him not just as a novelist, but as a journalist, teacher, and regional writer whose work helped define a literary image of the modern Southwest.

Still, the Leaphorn and Chee novels are the center of gravity. They gave Hillerman a series structure large enough to explore crime, history, federal and tribal authority, archaeology, greed, family loyalty, and the collision between modern institutions and older ways of understanding the world. The books are mysteries, but they are also novels about interpretation: reading land, reading motive, reading people across cultural boundaries. That is one reason his work endured beyond genre categories. Hillerman was never just arranging clues. He was writing about how knowledge itself is shaped by place and tradition.

Publication order matters in Hillerman’s work because the Leaphorn and Chee books deepen over time. What begins as a regional detective series grows into a more layered fictional world in which the relationship between the two men becomes one of the series’ central strengths. Later books gain force from the reader already knowing how differently Leaphorn and Chee think, and why that difference matters. His bibliography is therefore best read not as isolated Western-flavored mysteries, but as an evolving body of work with strong internal continuity.

Hillerman died in 2008, but his fictional world did not end with him. His daughter Anne Hillerman continued the series, with HarperCollins explicitly presenting her novels as continuations of Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee line, later expanding the emphasis to Leaphorn, Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito. That continuation says something important about the strength of the original creation: Hillerman built not just a detective duo, but an enduring fictional territory.

The best way to understand Tony Hillerman’s career is to see him as a writer who changed what an American mystery novel could hold. He brought tribal policing, Navajo country, and Southwestern history into the center of popular crime fiction without treating any of it as exotic backdrop. His novels are readable, suspenseful, and precise, but their lasting power comes from something larger: they made regional knowledge feel inseparable from human truth.