Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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A real sense of place

The Ghostway by Tony Hillerman

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Tony Hillerman mysteries are my jam. I love the sense of place he captures, the mood he creates and the characters we watch develop. That Hillerman is a white man writing about Native American people and places gives me pause, but what I’ve read suggests that he is knowledgeable on and accurate about the indigenous traditions and background he includes. And I just love these books! The Ghostway features Sergeant Jim Chee, a Navajo Nation detective who features in most of Hillerman’s novels. At the […]

The Blessing Way – Tony Hillerman (1970)

The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman

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This is a mystery novel, that based on the fact of something like 15 sequels launched two careers (of the writer Tony Hillerman, and later his daughter Anne Hillerman, who would pick up the series some 30 years later) as well as the careers of a few fictional detectives/police. It’s clear from this first novel though that there’s some searching for what exactly this novel and this eventual series wants to be. We follow not the police detective through most of this novel but an […]

The Trickster God Isn’t So Funny After All

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There was a brief period of time when my mother and I were very close. I was in college and we talked on the phone at least once a week. During this time (pre internet), we sent each other copies of Tony Hillerman books, and listened to a couple of them on tape during road trips. Even when we didn’t get along, we shared a love of pop culture. At some point, while I was in law school, out relationship became strained again. Because of […]



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