The Anne Hillerman Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito Series
Spider Woman’s Daughter Published 2013 Read Sept 2023
Rock with Wings Published 2015 Read Sept 2023
Song of the Lion Published 2017 Read Sept 2023
Cave of Bones Published 2018 Read Oct 2023
The Tale Teller Published 2019 Read Oct 2023
Stargazer Published 2021 Read Oct 2023
The Sacred Bridge Published 2022 Read Oct 2023
As discussed in Books-How They Mattered to Me This Year this author read extensively during some really difficult times. After completing the Tony Hillerman Canon of novels about the Navajo Nation starring Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, this reader turned to the Anne Hillerman novels. Daughter of Tony Hillerman, she continued the series.
This reader appreciates the approach Anne Hillerman took with this series. In the first installation of her series, Joe Leaphorn plays a small role as he is shot in an early scene and spends most of the rest of the book in a coma and later beginning to recuperate. This provides Anne Hillerman a chance to expand attention on Bernadette Manuelito who witnessed the shooting and is very conflicted about it as she feels she should have done more to prevent it (which wasn’t possible). Thus begins the series which give more focus on Bernadette Manuelito, a character introduced in the later Tony Hillerman series where she slowly evolved from an officer in Jim Chee’s station, to someone who is attractive to Jim Chee (and vice versa), to Chee’s girlfriend, and eventually to Chee’s wife.
During the first Anne Hillerman book, this reader wondered if Joe Leaphorn was going to be permanently written out of the series but was pleased that he does remain a character who is now consultant to the Navajo Nation police while retired. Bernadette Manuelito’s challenges with her mother who needs some in-home care and her sister who provides it and her ambitions to be a detective and the potential conflict that job will have with family life involving children become part of the over-arching flow of the characters’ stories.
Since the readers of this series were not George Guidall and varied across books, this reader reverted to reading with her eyes instead. The new readers tended to read flatly—no differentiation in “voicing” for the different characters which this reader missed greatly after George Guidall’s approach. But clearly this reader enjoyed the series as she read all that were available in the fall of 2023.
While preparing this post, this reader learned that another book in the series was published in 2023 so there is another book to read—hooray!
The photo shows Shiprock, the geological monument in the Navajo Nation for which the nearby town Shiprock is named.
MarshaReads.com 