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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.
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Leaphorn & Chee Series
with Anne Hillerman
- The Blessing Way (1970)
Buy on Amazon - Dance Hall of the Dead (1973)
Buy on Amazon - Listening Woman (1978)
Buy on Amazon - People of Darkness (1980)
Buy on Amazon - The Dark Wind (1982)
Buy on Amazon - The Ghostway (1984)
Buy on Amazon - Skinwalkers (1986)
Buy on Amazon - A Thief of Time (1988)
Buy on Amazon - Talking God (1989)
Buy on Amazon - Coyote Waits (1990)
Buy on Amazon - Sacred Clowns (1992)
Buy on Amazon - The Fallen Man (1996)
Buy on Amazon - The First Eagle (1998)
Buy on Amazon - Hunting Badger (1999)
Buy on Amazon - The Wailing Wind (2002)
Buy on Amazon - The Sinister Pig (2003)
Buy on Amazon - Skeleton Man (2004)
Buy on Amazon - The Shape Shifter (2006)
Buy on Amazon - Spider Woman’s Daughter (2013)
(By Anne Hillerman)
Buy on Amazon - Rock with Wings (2015)
(By Anne Hillerman)
Buy on Amazon - Song of the Lion (2017)
(By Anne Hillerman)
Buy on Amazon - Cave of Bones (2018)
(By Anne Hillerman)
Buy on Amazon - The Tale Teller (2019)
(By Anne Hillerman)
Buy on Amazon - Stargazer (2021)
(By Anne Hillerman)
Buy on Amazon - The Sacred Bridge (2022)
(By Anne Hillerman)
Buy on Amazon - The Way of the Bear (2023)
(By Anne Hillerman)
Buy on Amazon - Lost Birds (2024)
(By Anne Hillerman)
Buy on Amazon - Shadow of the Solstice (2025)
(By Anne Hillerman)
Buy on Amazon
Standalone Novels Series
- The Fly on the Wall (1971)
Buy on Amazon - Finding Moon (1995)
Buy on Amazon
Short Story Collections Series
- The Best of the West (1991)
Buy on Amazon - The Mysterious West (1994)
Buy on Amazon - The Great Taos Bank Robbery: And Other True Stories (2023)
Buy on Amazon
Children’s Series
- The Boy Who Made Dragonfly (1972)
Buy on Amazon - Buster Mesquite’s Cowboy Band (2001)
Buy on Amazon
Non-Fiction Series
- The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other Indian Country Affairs (1973)
Buy on Amazon - New Mexico, Rio Grande, and Other Essays (1975)
Buy on Amazon - The Spell of New Mexico (1976)
Buy on Amazon - Tony Hillerman’s Indian Country Map and Guide (1987)
Buy on Amazon - Indian Country (1987)
Buy on Amazon - Talking Mysteries: A Conversation With Tony Hillerman (1991)
(With Ernie Bulow)
Buy on Amazon - Hillerman Country (1991)
(With Barney Hillerman)
Buy on Amazon - Seldom Disappointed (2001)
Buy on Amazon - Kilroy Was There (2004)
Buy on Amazon
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.
Series: Tony Hillerman