Small Talk: Shooting the Breeze

[possibilities]

I read "The Thief of Time" because somehow I had the idea it was the first of the series. It was clear pretty quickly that it wasn't, but I kept reading anyway.

I will now go back and read "The Blessing Way" which IS the first book. 

I had read "Skinwalkers" a long time ago, and remembered it as being really great, very engaging. But I found "The Thief of Time" to be kind of thin, formulaic, just your standard mystery. 

I'm wondering if anyone else has read the Hillerman books and what you thought of them.

[Nashville]

I read several of them back in the early 90s.  My job had me flying back and forth pretty frequently between home and Albuquerque, where Hillerman lived; Hillerman was big enough in New Mexico back then to warrant his own dedicated section in many of the ABQ airport bookstores, so I’d often pick up his books for downtime reading material on work trips.

I’m currently in the process of rereading the entire Leaphorn / Chee series in chronological order of release, and I’ve found it pretty amazing (and more than a little disappointing) how few of his books are available in my local library system.  I’m wearing out all of the secondhand book shops in my area for what they have - which ain’t much - and hitting up Amazon for the rest.

[possibilities]

My library is tiny (I live in a non-town of 400 households), but the statewide Massachusetts interlibrary loan system is robust and right now I'm on a waiting list for Blessing Way! I haven't checked if all the books are in the system, but I'm optimistic.