A Thief of Time (21 page)
Authors: Tony Hillerman
A dead reporter's secret notebook implicates a senatorial candidate and political figures in a million-dollar murder scam.
THE FLY ON THE WALL
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. He 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 afterward, 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.
“Fascinatingâ¦breathless suspense.”
Minneapolis Tribune
“Explosiveâ¦sensationalâ¦excellent.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
An archaeological dig, a steel hypodermic needle, and the strange laws of the Zuñi complicate the disappearance of two young boys.
DANCE HALL OF THE DEAD
Two young boys suddenly disappear. One of them, a Zuñi, leaves a pool of blood behind. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police tracks the brutal killer. Three things complicate the search: an archaeological dig, a steel hypodermic needle, and the strange laws of the Zuñi. Compelling, terrifying, and highly suspenseful,
Dance Hall of the Dead
never relents from first page till last.
“High entertainment, an aesthetically
satisfying glimpse of the
still-powerful tribal mysteries.”
New York Times
“Riveting descriptions of Zuñi religious rites.”
Newsweek
A baffling investigation of murder, ghosts, and witches can be solved only by Lieutenant Leaphorn, a man who understands both his own people and cold-blooded killers.
LISTENING WOMAN
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 solutionâand is greeted with the most violent confrontation of his career.
“Hillerman's mysteries are specialâ¦
Listening Woman
is among the best.”
Washington Post
“A good exciting mystery that has everything.”
Pittsburgh Press
An assassin waits for Officer Chee in the desert to protect a vision of death that for thirty years has been fed by greed and washed in blood.
PEOPLE OF DARKNESS
Who would murder a dying man? Why would someone steal a box of rocks? And why would a rich man's wife pay $3,000 to get them back? These questions haunt Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police as he journeys into the scorching Southwest. But there, out in the Bad Country, a lone assassin waits for Chee to come seeking answers, waits ready and willing to protect a vision of death that for thirty years has been fed by greed and washed in blood.
“Hillermanâ¦is in a class by himself.”
Los Angeles Times
“Great suspense.”
Chicago Tribune
Sergeant Jim Chee becomes trapped in a deadly web of a cunningly spun plot driven by Navajo sorcery and white man's greed.
THE DARK WIND
A corpse whose palms and soles have been “scalped” is only the first in a series of disturbing clues: an airplane's mysterious crash in the nighttime desert, a bizarre attack on a windmill, a vanishing shipment of cocaine. Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police is trapped in a deadly web of a cunningly spun plot driven by Navajo sorcery and white man's greed.
“Hillerman is first-rateâ¦fresh, original,
and highly suspenseful.”
Los Angeles Times
“A beauty of a thrillerâ¦
exotic and compelling reading.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
A photo sends Officer Chee on an odyssey of murder and revenge that moves from an Indian hogan to a deadly healing ceremony.
THE GHOSTWAY
Old Joseph Joe sees it all. Two strangers spill blood at the Shiprock Wash-O-Mat. One dies. The other drives off into the dry lands of the Big Reservation, but not before he shows the old Navajo a photo of the man he seeks. This is enough to send Tribal Policeman Jim Chee after a killerâ¦and on an odyssey of murder and revenge that moves from an Indian hogan and its trapped ghost, to the dark underbelly of L.A., to a healing ceremony whose cure could be death.
“A first-rate story of suspense and mystery.”
The New Yorker
“Fresh, original and highly suspenseful.”
Los Angeles Times
Three shotgun blasts in a trailer bring Officer Chee and Lieutenant Leaphorn together for the first time in an investigation of ritual, witchcraft, and blood.
SKINWALKERS
Three shotgun blasts explode into the trailer of Officer Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police. But Chee survives to join partner Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn in a frightening investigation that takes them into a dark world of ritual, witchcraft, and bloodâall tied to the elusive and evil “skinwalker.” Brimming with Navajo lore and sizzling suspense,
Skinwalkers
brings Chee and Leaphorn, Hillerman's best-selling detective team, together for the first time.
“Full of mystery, intrigue, and
dangerous magic.”
Ross Thomas
“Hillerman is unique and S
kinwalkers
is one of his best.”
Los Angeles Times
A grave robber and a corpse reunite Leaphorn and Chee in a dangerous arena of superstition, ancient ceremony, and living gods.
TALKING GOD
As Leaphorn seeks the identity of a murder victim, Chee is arresting Smithsonian conservator Henry Highhawk for ransacking the sacred bones of his ancestors. As the layers of each case are peeled away, it becomes shockingly clear that they are connected, that there are mysterious others pursuing Highhawk, and that Leaphorn and Chee have entered into the dangerous arena of superstition, ancient ceremony, and living gods.
“Woven as tightly as a Navajo blanket.”
Newsweek
“Suddenly now Hillerman has become a
national literary and cultural sensationâ¦
it does not take too much to determine why
Hillerman has become so popular. He is a
solid, down-to-earth storyteller.”
Los Angeles Times
When a bullet kills Officer Jim Chee's good friend Del, a Navajo shaman is arrested for homicide, but the case is far from closed.
COYOTE WAITS
The car fire didn't kill Navajo Tribal Policeman Delbert Nez, a bullet did. Officer Jim Chee's good friend Del lies dead, and a whiskey-soaked Navajo shaman is found with the murder weapon. The old man is Ashie Pinto. He's quickly arrested for homicide and defended by a woman Chee could either love or loathe. But when Pinto won't utter a word of confession or denial, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn begins an investigation. Soon, Leaphorn and Chee unravel a complex plot of death involving a historical find, a lost fortuneâ¦and the mythical Coyote, who is always waiting, and always hungry.
“Hillerman is at the top of his form
in
Coyote Waits
.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“The master's newest Chee-Leaphorn
mystery with the usual informative
Navajo anthropology.”
Book News
Officer Chee attempts to solve two modern murders by deciphering the sacred clowns' ancient message to the people of the Tano pueblo.
SACRED CLOWNS
During a Tano kachina ceremony, something in the antics of the dancing
koshare
fills the air with tension. Moments later the clown is found brutally bludgeoned in the same manner that a reservation schoolteacher was killed just days before.
In true Navajo style, Officer Jim Chee and Lieutenant Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police go back to the beginning to decipher the sacred clowns' message to the people of the Tano pueblo. Amid guarded tribal secrets and crooked Indian traders, they find a trail of blood that links a runaway schoolboy, two dead bodies, and the mysterious presence of a sacred artifact.
“This is Hillerman at his best, mixing human
nature, ethnicity and the overpowering
physical presence of the Southwest.”
Newsweek
“[Hillerman's] affection for his characters
and for the real world in which they live
and work has never been more
appealingly demonstrated.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
A man met his death on Ship Rock Mountain eleven years ago, and with the discovery of his body by a group of climbers, Chee and Leaphorn must hunt down the cause of his lonely death.
THE FALLEN MAN
Sprawled on a ledge under the peak of Ship Rock Mountain for eleven years lies an unknown body, now only bones. At Canyon de Chelly, three hundred miles across the Navajo reservation, a sniper shoots an old canyon guide who has always walked that pollen path in peace. At his home in Window Rock, Joe Leaphorn, newly retired from the Navajo Tribal Po lice, connects skeleton and sniper, and remembers an old puzzle he could never solve. At his office in Shiprock, Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee is too busy to take much interest in the caseâuntil it hits too close to home. Bringing the beauty and mystery of the Southwest to vivid life once again, Tony Hillerman has reunited Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee in an evocative mystery in which the past and the present join forces in a most unholy union.
“The personal tensions add another facet
to the story, which continues the author's
fascination with the savagery that men
do to themselves and to the land
they claim to hold sacred.”
New York Times Book Review
When Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee catches a Hopi poacher huddled over a butchered Navajo Tribal Police officer, he has an open-and-shut caseâuntil his former boss, Joe Leaphorn, blows it wide open.
THE FIRST EAGLE
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 skinwalkerâa Navajo witchâwas 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.
“Surrendering to Hillerman's strong narrative
voice and supple storytelling techniques,
we come to see that ancient cultures and
modern sciences are simply different
mythologies for the same reality.”
New York Times Book Review
Hunting Badger
finds Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee working two angles of the same caseâeach trying to catch the right-wing militiamen who pulled off a violent heist at an Indian casino.
HUNTING BADGER
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 suspectâa 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 perplexingâand deadlyâcrime hunt of their livesâ¦
“Hillerman soars.”
Boston Globe
“Hillerman continues to dazzleâ¦
A standout.”
Washington Post Book World
A haunting tale of obsessive greedâof lost love and murderâas only the master, Tony Hillerman, can tell it.
THE WAILING WIND
Officer Bernadette Manuelito found the dead man slumped over the cab of a blue pickup abandoned in a dry gulch off a dirt roadâwith a rich ex-con's phone number in his pocket and a tobacco tin filled with tracer gold. It's her initial mishandling of the scene that spells trouble for her supervisor, Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Policeâbut it's the echoes of a long-ago crime scene 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.
“Enough to give anyone the shivers.”
New York Times Book Review
“Grade Aâ¦Thrilling, chillingâ¦
another Hillerman treasure.”
Denver Rocky Mountain News