Finding Moon

Moon Mathias's younger brother died in South Vietnam in a helicopter crash. It seemed that his brother Ricky had a daughter. Arrangements were made to send the child from Vietnam to the Philippines. Moon's mother has traveled from Florida to California enroute to the Philippines when she has a heart attack at the airport. Moon is a journalist, the managing editor of a newspaper in Colorado, and as Ricky's only sibling... Read Full Review

All you need to know is that it is an adventure, not a mystery. The rest is Hillerman's typical brilliant story telling. In fact in this novel Hillerman goes beyond the usual because he weaves in historic events that are usually forgotten about in today's media (ie the real ending of the Vietnam War).

Tony Hillerman has definitely given us his best change-up pitch with Finding Moon. We are not on the reservation. In fact, we travel back in time to the Vietnamese war as one simple man attempts to carry out his Mother's search for the missing niece of her dead, other son.The story recounts twenty-seven days, with a few skipped. Each one leads off with a quote from the news of the time about Vietnam. The story ends... Read Full Review

I fell in love with Hillerman because of his Chee/Leaphorn novels but I now count Finding Moon as one of Hillerman's best. The plot is interesting, it is well written and evocative, but the best aspect of this novel is the fact that a plain, ordinary man, discovers the extraoridanary individual inside of himself. This book is haunting, uplifting, and powerful.

Hillerman seems to have had a deep need to write Finding Moon--the same way he seems to have HAD to write such books as Dancehall of the Dead or The Dark Wind. And yet its neither a mystery, nor set in the Southwest, and there's not a Navajo in sight. But Hillerman seems to have dedicated it to several fellow soldiers, and says he's used some of them in the book. I think there's a story there, that he's telling somehow... Read Full Review