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Site Purpose:  This site strives to encourage Young Adult readers, after they have become fairly familiar with the writings of one author or a particular genre, to move on to similar, but more challenging adult books.  In order to do this, I have provided an index to the selected authors and another to the their books, which allow the visitor to move quickly to any book on my list.

One additional note.  Comments made by me, the web author (WA) will be colored teal and introduced with the letters WA:.

Instructional Suggestions.  In the 10th grade some students study World Literature and World History.  The novels of Tony Hillerman take place around the "Four Corners" area of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado.

Since many of our students are familiar with these areas, having either lived or traveled there or seen documentaries, these locations lend themselves especially well to the literary circle role of "tracker."  A tracker finds or draws maps that show the locations of different activities and investigations.  Such a map provides the readers with an appreciation of distances, time lapse and an indicator of the sequence of many events.  Locations described in the novels as well as images available over the Internet give the reader a great sense of what the characters are going through and experiencing.

Now take this "tracking" skill to another level and we have "global tracking" of thriller plots that take the reader all over the world.  This is an excellent opportunity for the reader to get a better feel for international locations, distances and the attending climate and weather conditions.  This in turn can build upon some of the themes and locations taught in World Geography.

There are many other opportunities that will present themselves to the reader, but this is one idea that I think can be implemented and enjoyed more than previously thought by readers and teachers.

Target Authors Index:

        Tony Hillerman

        Robert Ludlum

        Robin Cook

        Rudolfo Anaya

Transition Book Index.
Click on the book title and it will take you to a brief introduction.  If you would like to read the complete review, click on the book cover.

        Tony Hillerman's The Fallen Man

        Tony Hillerman's The First Eagle

        Tony Hillerman's Hunting Badger

        Tony Hillerman's Talking God

        Tony Hillerman's Skinwalkers

        Tony Hillerman's Listening Woman

        Robert Ludlum's The Matarese Countdown

        Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity

        Robert Ludlum's The Apocalypse Watch

        Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Supremacy

        Robert Ludlum's The Holcroft Covenant

        Robert Ludlum's The Parzifal Mosaic

        Robin Cook's Vector

         Rudolfo Anaya's Zia Summer

References Index.
The images, biographical information and summaries have primarily come from the Internet.  When I have made comments, then that has been indicated in the body of that text.  All of these references were accessed, but not necessarily used for the site topic.

Click HERE to go to references.

The Author: Tony Hillerman
http://www.bastulli.com/Hillerman/HILLERMAN.htm

Born in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, Tony Hillerman was one of the several farm boys that went to the local boarding school for Native American girls. He then went to Konawa high school. In combat during the Second World War (he earned two medals). he later went to the University of Oklahoma where he got a BA in journalism. Hillerman subsequently worked as a journalist in various posts before going back to university in 1963 at the University of New Mexico. Assistant to the University president, after his MA in English he started teaching in the faculty of journalism and served as department chair from 1976 to 1981. He taught there until 1987. The Fly on the Wall (1971) was relatively successful so Hillerman's plan to translate a life time interest in Indian culture into detective stories began to be a possibility. Thus the birth of the series featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn the second of which, Dance Hall of the Dead, won the Edgar Award in 1974. After starting a second series featuring Sergeant Jim Chee he decided to group them together in Skinwalkers that earned him an Anthony Award in 1988. Highly considered as a storyteller he was also awarded a Macavity for Thief of Time in 1989 as well as the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. He is married, has six children and currently lives in Albuquerque.

No Image of the author found.

The Author: Robert Ludlum
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,451717,00.html

The thriller writer Robert Ludlum, who has died of a heart attack on March 13, 2001 at the age of 73, in the gulf coast town of Naples, Florida, was one of a handful of authors who invented and came to define airport fiction. He enjoyed a 30-year writing career in which, according to his publisher, he sold more than 210m copies of his 21 novels.

Put crudely, Ludlum was the fictional arm of the globalization of American culture. Before him, its popular fiction had been rooted in established genres - westerns, crime fiction, historical romance, sub-James Bond spy thrillers. Like Arthur Hailey and Tom Clancy, Ludlum blasted aside such boundaries, mirroring, as he did so, the rise of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. And yet he did not write his first novel, The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971), until he was in his 40s.

Ludlum was born in New York, and grew up in Short Hills, New Jersey. He left home as a teenager in 1941 and, getting a part in a touring play, tried to make it as an actor. His parents soon rescued him from Broadway, after which he spent two years with the US Marine Corps in the Pacific in the aftermath of the second world war. He then attended Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, where he met his actress wife, Mary Ryducha.

Together they went into the theatre, where Ludlum spent the next two decades working as an actor, with minor roles on television and on Broadway, and then as a producer, running what was allegedly America's first shopping-mall theatre, the Playhouse, in Paramus, New Jersey. In 1960, he produced The Owl And The Pussycat, using a then unknown actor named Alan Alda.

Having a famously deep voice, Ludlum also made some money doing voice-overs on the side; he once claimed that uttering the words "Plunge works fast", in a toilet cleaner commercial, put one of his sons through college. When the theatre business began to pall, he quit to write his first novel.

The key ingredients were there from the start - a grand conspiracy, and forces of unimaginable evil that only one individual could thwart. The Scarlatti Inheritance was a preposterous, yet compelling, yarn revolving around the notion that, back in the 1920s, a worldwide cabal of high-ranking Nazi sympathizers made a plan to ensure world domination. At the heart of the plan is a child called Ulster, reared specially for the job and now ready to go into action. There is only one person who can stop him - his mother.

The book was an immediate success, and Ludlum followed it up with a book a year through the 1970s, each one with the same signature-title construction. The Osterman Weekend (1972) was filmed (unmemorably) by Sam Peckinpah. The Bourne Identity (1980), perhaps the pick of the bunch, has just been filmed, with Matt Damon in the lead. One after another, the titles continued to sell more than 20m each, Ludlum's readers apparently happy enough despite the fact that his formula was becoming ever more transparent and repetitive.

His great talent was as a storyteller. Arguably, the key to Ludlum's success was precisely the fact that he took a historically political genre, the spy thriller, and turned it into pure escapism by making everything larger than life. He did this both literally - his books got longer and longer as time went on - and conceptually, since nothing less than the safety of the world was ever at stake, and the action could never be contained in a single continent. Which is part of what made him the perfect airport novelist: what better for a busy executive - or would-be executive - to read as he jets around the world than a novel that does likewise?

The other keystone of Ludlum's popularity was painstaking research. He explained that he spent about three months on research, and about 15 months writing his books. Thanks to that, his thrillers always had the air of being written by a man in the know, an important quality in popular fiction aimed at the male reader - and Ludlum is very much a writer of boys' books - who likes a hefty amount of factual information.

The Author: Robin Cook
http://www.bookbrowser.com/Reviews/CookRobin/vector.html

Internationally renowned Robin Cook has been recognized for two decades as one of the reigning monarchs of the medical thriller. His latest entry, VECTOR, shows the grandmaster still has the regal touch as he delivers a blistering commentary about arms dealers, biological weapons, and self-righteous terrorists within an exciting story line. The characters, who were last seen in CHROMOSOME 6, remain likable and genuine as they struggle with everyday problems and insecurities while coping with what could become a medical emergency. This is a one-sitting, superb story that shall Cook's myriad of fans that he remains the master chef of the sub-genre.

Best-selling author Dr Robin Cook is currently on leave from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. The author of many best-selling novels, most recently Chromosome 6, Invasion and Contagion, he lives and works in Florida. In the past three years, four of his novels have been produced as highly successful films for television, with three more in production.

His novels all seem to deal with one form or another of medical suspense, especially deadly viruses!

http://web.csuchico.edu/~aparna/cookbio.html
Robin Cook received his M.D. in 1966. He then served in the US Navy from 1969 to 1971, working his way up to Lieutenant Commander. While in the Navy, and under the Pacific, he wrote his first book, The Year of the Intern, about his surgical residency at Queen’s Hospital in Hawaii. When he returned to the real life outside the military he was a resident at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary for 1971 to 1975. After this he took some time off to spend more time writing. He also opened his own practice in Boston.
    He never realized how lucky he was to have written a best seller his first time. He compares it later to a person winning the lottery. He also acknowledges the fact that he can write very quickly. This has been an asset to him, because he continues to practice medicine while he writes. Fifteen of his seventeen books, as of 1995, have been on the best seller list. At many different times he has taken leaves of absence to focus on writing, and it seems that now he does not need to return to his original occupation.
    He is very concerned with writing issues that will inform the public. He has come to the conclusion that he could write an educational article, but that in reality many more people will become aware through the use of a science fiction novel. He often concentrates on women’s issues, like a woman’s place within the healthcare field, and women’s  advancements within the medical field. He also often focuses on the economy issues of medicine. Vital Signs is a great example of how money can play a large part in the motivations of medical professionals. His critiques of the medical fields began early when he was a medical student and has continued throughout this literary career.
    He has been married twice, neither of which were very successful and he has no children. He lives in many places around the country and has interest in things like basketball and architecture, which keep him connected to society.

The Author: Rudolfo Anaya
http://web.nmsu.edu/~tomlynch/swlit.anaya.html

Rudolfo Anaya was born October 30, 1937, to Rafaelita Mares and Martin Anaya. He is the fifth offspring in a family of seven children. Rudolfo began his life in a small village of Pastura, New Mexico. When he was a small boy his family moved on towards the eastern plains of Santa Rosa, New Mexico. His mother's lineage comes from Llano (farmers) and his father is a vaquero (cowboy).

Thoughts of his childhood reflect the special times with his La Grande (grandmother). In Focus On Criticism he stated, "some say she was a curandera, a woman who knew how to use her power and herbs to cure sickness" (361). In the Spanish culture a curandera is someone who has power of the human soul or, in lay terms, a folk healer.

Rudolfo and his siblings were raised in a devout Catholic home. At home he was spoken to in Spanish and therefore became bilingual. In 1952, when he was fifteen years of age, his family moved to Albuquerque, settling in the Barelas barrio (neighborhood) at 433 Pacific. Graduating High School in 1956, and later dropping out of business school, he received his degree and accepted a teaching position in a small town.

The novel Bless Me, Ultima took seven years to write. The novel was first published by El Grito (a Chicano magazine). In 1972, Rudolfo Anaya was awarded the prestigious Premio Quinto Sol Award.

His second novel, Heart of Aztlan explores the relationship of communal youths entering adulthood and moving to the cities. The summer of 1974, he accepted a position at the University of New Mexico in the English Department. That same year he served on the board of Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. During this time he was working on Tortuga, his third novel. The novel Tortuga is about individuals who are in total despair and reach back to look at their faith to survive. Rudolfo found inner wisdom in this area by reflecting back on past trials and tribulations of adolescence.

Rudolfo is the extraordinary novelist of Jalamanta, Alburquerque, The Anaya Reader, and Zia Summer just to mention a few. He has written several journals, theses, and commentaries. He has been awarded the PEN Center West Award for Fiction for his novel Alburquerque.

Tony Hillerman's The Fallen Man

Sprawled on the ledge under the peak of Ship Rock mountain for 11 years lies an unknown body, now only bones. At Canyon de Chelly, three hundred miles across the Navajo reservation, a sniper shoots an old canyon guide who had always walked that pollen path in peace. At his home in Window Rock, Joe Leaphorn, newly retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, connects skeleton and sniper and remembers an old puzzle he could never solve. At his office in Shiprock, Acting Lt. Jim Chee is too busy to take much interest in the case until it hits too close to home.

WA:  This story of a long unsolved crime could lead the reader to Robert Ludlum's The Matarese Circle and its sequel, The Matarese Countdown.  The latter story forces Brandon Scofield to come out of retirement to help solve an international conspiracy that is prepared to throw the world into chaos, twenty years after its initial failure at a similar effort.

Tony Hillerman's The First Eagle

When Acting Lt. Jim Chee catches a Hopi poacher huddled over a butchered Navajo Tribal police officer, he has an open-and-shut case - until his former boss, Joe Leaphorn, blows it wide open. Now retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, Leaphorn has been hired to find a hot-headed female biologist hunting for the key to a virulent plague lurking in the Southwest. The scientist disappeared from the same area the same day the Navajo cop was murdered. Is she a suspect or another victim? And what about a report that a skinwalker - a Navajo witch - was seen at the same time and place too? For Leaphorn and Chee, the answers lie buried in a complicated knot of superstition and science, in a place where the worlds of native peoples and outside forces converge and collide

WA:  Virulent plague and biological warfare go hand in hand.  After reading The First Eagle, the reader might go on to Vector, by Robin Cook, which involves a plot to use anthrax to kill thousands in a U. S. city.

Tony Hillerman's Hunting Badger

In 1998 three heavily armed "survivalists" came out of the Four Corners canyons in a stolen truck. They murdered a policeman, had a shootout with pursuers, and then vanished - eluding a manhunt that eventually involved hundreds of officers from more than twenty federal and state agencies. The crime and the bungled FBI investigation left behind a web of mysteries: Why did one of the bandits kill himself? How did the others escape? Why has no one in this impoverished area claimed the huge reward the government still offers? Most puzzling of all, what crime were they en route to commit when Officer Dale Claxton stopped them - and paid for his bravery with his life?

The time is now, and the memory of the mishandled manhunt of 1998 is still painfully fresh. Three men stage a predawn raid on the Ute tribe's gambling casino. They kill one policeman, wound another, and disappear in the maze of canyons on the Utah-Arizona border. The FBI takes over the investigation, and agents swarm in with their helicopters, their high-tech equipment, and a theory of the crime that makes a wounded deputy sheriff a suspect. This development calls Chee in from his vacation, and a request for a favor draws in Leaphorn. Chee finds a fatal flaw in the federal theory, and Leaphorn sees an intriguing pattern connecting this crime with the exploits of a legendary Ute hero-bandit.

WA:  An intended crime is thwarted before the objective is known and remains dormant for a number of years.  This might be a transition to a resurgence in the Neo-Nazi German 4th Reich.  After World War II, special children were placed with American families and given the best education and opportunities to succeed.  Now these children are grown and ready to re-institute elements of the dormant 4th Reich in America!

Tony Hillerman's Talking God

A grave robber and a corpse reunite Navajo Tribal Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee. As Leaphorn seeks the identity of a murder victim, Chee is arresting Smithsonian conservator Henry Highhawk for ransacking the sacred bones of his ancestors. As the layers of each case are peeled away, it becomes shockingly clear that they are connected, that there are mysterious others pursuing Highhawk, and that Leaphorn and Chee have entered into the dangerous arena of superstition, ancient ceremony, and living gods

WA: From this book the reader might enjoy Ludlum's Bourne Identity or Anaya's Zia Summer.  Zia Summer involves a lot of superstition, ancient ceremony and spiritualism.  Jason Bourne, in the Bourne Identity, is fished out of the Mediterranean riddled with bullets and almost dead.  Jason can only vaguely remember who he is and so throughout the story begins to uncover layers within layers to his true and secret identity.

Tony Hillerman's Skinwalkers

Three shotgun blasts explode into the trailer of Officer Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police. But Chee survives to join partner Lt. Joe Leaphorn in a frightening investigation that takes them into a dark world of ritual, witchcraft, and blood - all tied to the elusive and evil "skinwalker.

WA:  The reader might continue on with the same themes of witchcraft and ritual blood killings found in Anaya's Zia Summer as Sonny, a young Hispanic investigator attempts to find out who killed his cousin and the then wife of the mayor.

Tony Hillerman's Listening Woman

The state police and FBI are baffled when an old man and a teenaged girl are brutally murdered. The blind Navajo Listening Woman speaks of ghosts and witches. But Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn knows his people and begins an investigation that leads to the most violent confrontation of his career.

WA: Related theme continues in Zia Summer by Rudolfo Anaya.

Robert Ludlum's The Matarese Countdown

In the opening scenes of The Matarese Countdown, Robert Ludlum, with a deft touch, recreates the ambiance that takes a reader back more than twenty years to the opening scenes of The Matarese Circle. This tells us in no uncertain terms that the Matarese is back.

With tentacles everywhere, the Matarese was the personification of evil at its most vicious and relentless. Its goal was economic domination of the world. Ludlum fans will remember Brandon Scofield from the CIA who joined with one of the KGB's finest to defeat it

Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity

Jason Bourne. He has no past. And he may have no future. His memory is blank. He only knows that he was flushed out of the Mediterranean Sea, his body riddled with bullets. There are a few clues. A frame of microfilm surgically implanted beneath the flesh of his hip. Evidence that plastic surgery has altered his face. Strange things that he says in his delirium -- maybe code words. Initial: "J.B." And a number on the film negative that leads to a Swiss bank account, a fortune of four million dollars, and, at last, a name: Jason Bourne. But now he is marked for death, caught in a maddening puzzle, racing for survival through the deep layers of his buried past into a bizarre world of murderous conspirators -- led by Carlos, the world's most dangerous assassin. And no one can help Jason Bourne but the woman who once wanted to escape him.

Robert Ludlum's The Apocalypse Watch
0-553-56957-0 | April 1996 | $7.99

Deep in the Hausruck Mountains of Austria, there is a remote hideaway-- the fortress-like nerve center of an ominous movement, the Brotherhood of the Watch. American agent Harry Latham has penetrated the movement, a neo-Nazi organization that was born in the days after the Third Reich's defeat and whose deadly tentacles have spread to the United States and beyond. Now, after three years in deep cover, and on the eve of his most spectacular success, Harry Latham has disappeared.

Drew Latham, Special Officer for Consular Operations in Paris, is frantic to discover his older brother's fate. But when he receives the sudden good news that Harry has surfaced, gut-twisting doubts arise. Has Harry's cover been blown? And if so, why has the Brotherhood of the Watch let him live.

For Harry Latham has emerged with an explosive list: the secret supporters of the movement, among them some of the highest-ranking officials in the United States and its allies, names synonymous with honorable service to their nations. It is a document that could topple governments--but is the list legitimate? Can Drew Latham trust his own brother?

To find the answer, Drew Latham decides to take on his brother's identity, stepping directly into the crossfire between the assassins gunning for Harry Latham--and those who want Drew himself dead.

Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Supremacy

In a Kowloon Cabaret, scrawled in a pool of blood, is a name the world wanted to forget: Jason Bourne.  The Chinese vice-premier has been brutally slain by a legendary assassin. World leaders ask the same fearful questions: Why has Jason Bourne come back? Who is paying him? Who is the next to die? But U.S. officials know the shocking truth: There is no Jason Bourne.

The name was created as cover for David Webb on his search for the notorious killer Carlos. Someone else has taken the Bourne identity--and unless he is stopped, the world will pay a devastating price. So Jason Bourne must live again. Once again, Webb must utilize his lethal skills, because once again, like a nightmare relived, the woman he loves is suddenly torn from his life. To find her, trap his own impostor, and uncover an explosive secret plan, Webb must launch a desperate odyssey into the espionage killing fields. But this time, survival will not be enough. This time Bourne must reign supreme.

Robert Ludlum's The Holcroft Covenant

The Fourth Reich is waiting to be born. The only man who can stop it is about to sign its birth certificate. In 1945 the children of the Third Reich were secretly hidden all over the world-to be concealed until the 1970's, when they would come of age. Then the most elaborate plans and $780 million in a Swiss bank would be waiting. There would even be an unsuspecting outsider to set the plan into action. that outsider is Noel Holcroft, the American son of a high-ranking Nazi. He's just been shown an amazing document, the Holcroft Covenant. If he signs, it will be his own death warrant and a devastating threat to the security of the world. 

Robert Ludlum's The Parzifal Mosaic

Michael Havelock's world died on a moonlit beach on the Costa Brava. He watched as his partner and lover, Jenna Karats, double agent, was efficiently gunned down by his own agency. There was nothing left for him but to quit the game, get out. Until, in one frantic moment on a crowded railroad platform in Rome, Havelock saw his Jenna alive. From then on, he was marked for death by both U.S. and Russian assassins, racing around the globe after his beautiful betrayer, trapped in a massive mosaic of treachery created by a top-level mole with the world in his fist--Parsifal.

Robin Cook's Vector

Cook's newest novel, "Vector," deals with one of America's greatest fears - a deadly biological cloud being used against the civilian population of a large city.

In Manhattan, Dr. Jack Stapleton, a forensic pathologist in the New York City Medical Examiner's Office, is handling a case involving the puzzling death of a store owner. Even an autopsy doesn't reveal the cause of death. Through sheer determination, Stapleton keeps ordering toxicology tests on the organs of the deceased until finally the cause is pinpointed: suffocation and complications as a result of inhaling anthrax.

Yet, Stapleton can't find other similar deaths. Unbeknownst to health officials, that lone anthrax death was neither accidental nor isolated. Instead, it was an anthrax potency test on an innocent victim perpetrated by right-wing zealots.

Rudolfo Anaya's Zia Summer
http://www.twbookmark.com/books/71/0446518433/

Rudolfo Anaya's Zia Summer will be to Nuevo Mexicanos what Tony Hillerman's novels are to the Pueblo Indians.  Zia Summer features Sonny Baca, a small-time Albuquerque P.I. whose heroic dreams find substance when he investigates his cousin Gloria's sensational murder.

An Albuquerque teacher turned private eye, Sonny is the great-grandson of the fabled lawman Elfego Baca. He always carries his forebearer's Colt .45, but wonders if he also carries his bisabuelo's courage. While the elder Baca gained fame by ridding Old New Mexico of dangerous desperadoes, Sonny ekes out a living investigating tacky divorces and dubious insurance claims . . . until Gloria Dominic is murdered in a most ghastly fashion. Her body had been drained of its blood, the Zia sun symbol etched around her navel. Sonny recognizes this perverted use of the sacred sun sign is the work of brujas, evil witches. He senses a mysterious connection between the past and present. The Aztecs used blood to feed the sun. Was Gloria's stolen blood likewise a gift to the sun? And what about the recent cases of cattle mutilation plaguing the area?

Encouraged by his girlfriend, Rita, and spurred on by the restless spirit of Gloria haunting him, Sonny's search for truth leads him straight into Albuquerque's treacherous political arena -- and a passionate environmental battle over nuclear waste transport and disposal.

It is a summer of the sun, of community rage, bad blood, black magic, and a high-stakes showdown that pits Anglos against Chicanos, government agencies against bizarre cultists, and old ways against new. It is the Zia summer, and it will force Sonny Baca to face his deadliest case as he fights for his own life...and for the survival of the city itself.