Below is the complete list of Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Leaphorn and Chee Books
with Anne Hillerman
About Leaphorn and Chee
Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee series began as something less symmetrical than its familiar name suggests. Across eighteen novels published from 1970 to 2006, Hillerman gradually built a crime-fiction world around Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, but the two men did not start as partners. The first three novels center on Leaphorn, the next three shift to Chee, and only with Skinwalkers does the series bring them together. That evolving structure became one of its strengths, allowing two markedly different investigators to illuminate the same vast Southwestern setting from contrasting perspectives.
Joe Leaphorn first appears in The Blessing Way, followed by Dance Hall of the Dead and Listening Woman. He is the older, more experienced figure: methodical, skeptical, attentive to patterns, and inclined to reduce seemingly inexplicable events to evidence and motive. Hillerman never makes him culturally detached, but Leaphorn’s outlook is shaped by analytical discipline and by an instinct for understanding how people, places, and actions fit together. His investigations often unfold across enormous distances where geography itself becomes part of the problem.
Jim Chee enters in People of Darkness and leads The Dark Wind and The Ghostway before meeting Leaphorn on the page. Younger and more openly concerned with questions of Navajo tradition, Chee studies ceremonial knowledge and considers the role of a hataalii, or traditional healer, alongside his police work. His conflicts are therefore not merely procedural. Hillerman uses Chee to explore competing obligations involving career, belief, relationships, and the pressure to move between different cultural expectations.
When the two investigators finally converge in Skinwalkers, the series acquires the form for which it is best known. They are not interchangeable detectives, and Hillerman does not erase their disagreements for the sake of an easy partnership. Their differences in age, temperament, experience, and worldview create productive tension. Later novels such as A Thief of Time, Talking God, and Coyote Waits deepen that relationship while expanding the range of cases around them.
The physical world of the series is equally important. Hillerman’s mysteries are rooted in the Navajo Nation and the wider Four Corners region, where reservation roads, mesas, canyons, weather, isolation, and long travel distances shape investigations. Archaeology, federal agencies, jurisdictional boundaries, tourism, resource disputes, and the trade in culturally significant objects recur as sources of conflict. The setting is not a detachable backdrop; it determines what can be seen, who can reach a crime scene, how information travels, and why apparently small details matter.
Over time, the books develop a broader recurring cast, most notably Bernadette Manuelito. Initially connected to Chee through Navajo Tribal Police work, she grows increasingly important in the later novels and becomes central to the future of the fictional world. By the time Hillerman reaches The Wailing Wind, The Sinister Pig, Skeleton Man, and his final novel, The Shape Shifter, Leaphorn’s retirement and Chee’s changing responsibilities have altered the balance established in the earlier books.
The series is consequently best understood as a long continuum rather than eighteen repetitions of one detective formula. Careers change, relationships develop, and earlier experience informs later choices. Hillerman also allows the center of gravity to move: first Leaphorn, then Chee, then the two men together, with Manuelito gaining greater significance as the sequence matures.
Hillerman’s own run ends with The Shape Shifter in 2006, but the characters did not disappear. His daughter Anne Hillerman continued the world with Spider Woman’s Daughter in 2013, placing Bernadette Manuelito more firmly at the center alongside Leaphorn and Chee. Those later books are commonly distinguished as the Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito series, making the shift in authorship and emphasis important when separating Tony Hillerman’s original eighteen-novel sequence from its continuing literary legacy.