Home > Children > Children's Fiction > The Fly on the Wall

The Fly on the Wall

List Price: $6.99

Save 5.0%

You Pay: $6.64

Want this eBook?Our eBook Library Software is required to purchase and download eBooks. Download it here.

Tell a Friend

Overview

Loaded with e-book extras (not available in the print edition), including Tony Hillerman's running commentary on his work, his series heroes Leaphorn and Chee, and a special profile of the Navajo nation.

A dead reporter's secret notebook implicates a senatorial candidate and political figures in a million-dollar murder scam.

John Cotton was a simple man with one desire: to write the greatest story of his life and have enough life left to read all about it.

Reporter John Cotton knows what to do when he finds a great story, but he is a little afraid when a big story begins to find him. It starts when a fellow reporter is murdered and his notebook, filled with information about a tax scam, ends up in John's hands. Not long afterwards, a body is discovered in John's car. Then John's car ends up in the river, a bomb is found in his apartment, and his girlfriend drops out of sight. It's up to John to unravel the mystery of the notebook and why anyone would kill for the information it contains.

"Explosive... sensational... excellent."

Editorial Reviews

Editorial Reviews for this product are not available at this time.

Author Information

Bio of Tony Hillerman

As a journalist, Hillerman has worked for newspapers in Oklahoma and for UPI. He has been a political reporter in Santa Fe, a professor of journalism and chair of the journalism department at the University of New Mexico, and assistant to the president of that university. The American Southwest and its landscape and peoples, particularly the Navajo, are the focus for many of Hillerman's mysteries. He hopes that people learn more about Native Americans and their cultures by reading his books, and he draws upon their many traditions and stories for his novels. Thus, as people read Hillerman's work, they are learning about another culture and history as well as enjoying a finely crafted mystery. His two detectives---Officer Jim Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn---first came together in Skinwalkers (1987). Tony Hillerman's many honors include the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar & Grand Master awards, the Silver Spur Award for best novel set in the West, & the Navajo tribe's Special Friend Award. His best-selling novels include "The First Eagle", "The Fallen Man", & "Finding Moon".

Customer Reviews

There are no customer reviews available at this time. To add your review, Register or Sign In to your account using our free eBook Library Software.

Additional Info

Imprint

HarperCollins

Filesize

1015.71 KB

Number of Pages

4

eBook ISBN

9780061000287

Awards

  • Edgar Awards (Edgar Allan Poe Awards)

Excerpt from: The Fly on the Wall by Tony Hillerman

Chapter One
John Cotton had been in the pressroom almost an hour when Merrill McDaniels came in. He had written a five-hundred-word overnighter wrapping up the abortion-bill hearings in the House Public Affairs Committee. He had teletyped that and a shorter item on a gubernatorial appointment to the state desk of the Tribune. Then Cotton had stood at the window a tall, wiry man with a longish, freckled, somber face. He had thought first about what he would write for his political column, about how badly he wanted a smoke, and then had drifted into other thoughts. He had considered the dust on the old-fashioned window panes, and the lights the phosphorescent glow of the city surrounding the semidarkness of the state capitol grounds. In the clear, dry air of Santa Fe there wouldn't be this glow. Each light would be an individual glitter without this defraction of cold, misty humidity. Twenty blocks away, by the river below Statehouse Hill, the glow was faintly pink with the neon of the downtown business district. It outlined vaguely the blunt, irregular skyline: the square tower of Federal Citybank, the black glass monolith of the Hefron Building, the dingy granite of the Commodity Exchange te seats of money and power rising out of a moderately dirty middle-aged Midwestern city, clustered beside a polluted Midwestern river. Not very large and not very small. About 480,900 people, the Chamber of Commerce said. Exactly 412,318 by the last federal census, not counting the satellite towns and not counting those who farmed the infinity of cornfields and the hilltops of wheat that surrounded it all.

Farm-belt landscape. Rich. Nine-hundred-dollar-an-acre country. Beautiful if you liked it and Cotton had thought again that he didn't like it. The humid low-level sky oppressed him. He missed the immense skyscapes of the mountains and the deserts. And he thought, as he had thought many times before, that one day he would write Ernie Danilov a letter and tell the managing editor he was quitting. He would enjoy writing that letter.

And then, just a few minutes before McDaniels walked in, he sat down again at his desk. He typed "At the Capitol" and his byline on a sheet of copy paper and wrote rapidly.