Below is the complete list of Tony Hillerman books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Leaphorn and Chee Books
with Anne Hillerman
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Short Story Collections Books
Publication Order of Children’s Books
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
About Tony Hillerman
Tony Hillerman was an American mystery writer, journalist, and educator whose fiction became inseparable from the landscapes of the Southwest and the investigations of Navajo police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Born in 1925 in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, he grew up in a rural community and attended St. Mary’s Academy, a school primarily serving Native American girls. Hillerman later connected those early experiences with his rejection of simplistic divisions between Native and non-Native people, an outlook that would become important to the kind of crime fiction he eventually wrote.
His path to authorship passed through war and journalism. Hillerman served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War and was seriously wounded in Europe. After returning home, he studied journalism at the University of Oklahoma and began a newspaper career that took him through Texas and Oklahoma before he moved to New Mexico in 1952. He worked in journalism and public information, later earning a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico. From 1966 until 1987, he taught journalism at the university, eventually becoming a prominent figure in New Mexico’s literary life.
Hillerman published his first novel, The Blessing Way, in 1970. The book introduced Joe Leaphorn, a Navajo Tribal Police officer whose disciplined investigative thinking became one of the foundations of Hillerman’s best-known body of work. Dance Hall of the Dead followed in 1973 and won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, establishing Hillerman as a major crime writer rather than simply a regional novelist. The early Leaphorn books already displayed his characteristic method: mysteries rooted in place, conflicting systems of knowledge, social pressures, and the practical difficulties of policing immense rural territory.
Jim Chee entered the series in People of Darkness. Younger than Leaphorn and different in temperament, Chee is more deeply drawn toward Navajo ceremonial knowledge and the possibility of becoming a traditional healer. The contrast between the two men gave Hillerman a richer structure than a single-detective series could provide. Leaphorn tends toward skepticism and analytical order; Chee’s life is more visibly shaped by questions of tradition, cultural continuity, and competing personal obligations. When the two characters eventually began sharing novels, notably with Skinwalkers, their differences became a central source of tension and depth.
Across eighteen novels in the sequence, Hillerman developed a distinctive form of police procedural in which geography is never incidental. Deserts, mesas, reservation roads, weather, distance, and the Four Corners region influence what characters can know and how investigations unfold. Representative books such as A Thief of Time, Coyote Waits, and The Fallen Man show his ability to connect criminal plots with archaeology, institutional conflict, family history, or pressures surrounding cultural heritage. His strongest fiction rarely treats the Southwest as decorative scenery; the physical environment shapes the logic of the story.
Hillerman also wrote beyond the Leaphorn and Chee mysteries. His bibliography includes standalone fiction, nonfiction about the Southwest, photography-related works, and the memoir Seldom Disappointed, which recounts his Oklahoma childhood, wartime experiences, journalism career, family life, and development as a novelist. That broader work reflects the same attentiveness to landscape and regional history that readers encounter in his mysteries.
His career brought major recognition, including the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award and the Navajo Tribal Council’s Special Friend of the Diné honor. Hillerman died in Albuquerque in 2008, two years after The Shape Shifter, his final Leaphorn and Chee novel. His literary legacy did not end there: his daughter Anne Hillerman later continued the fictional world, bringing Bernadette Manuelito more fully to the foreground while retaining Leaphorn and Chee. Tony Hillerman’s own work remains distinctive for the way it joins crime, character, terrain, and cultural complexity without reducing the mystery to a detachable puzzle.