Native American Fiction Mystery

An old man's hazy memory and a Polaroid snapshot are all Chee has to go on, but they are enough to send him deep into an underworld of murder and revenge when a shootout erupts between two strangers at the Shiprock Wash-O-Mat. One man dies, and the other drives off but not before showing old Joseph Joe a photograph of the man he is looking for. It's not much of a lead for Sergeant Chee, but it's enough to put him on the killer's trail.

One of the most viewed paintings in American history, Custer's Last Fight, copied and distributed by Anheuser-Busch at a rate of more than two million copies a year, was destroyed in a fire at the 7th Cavalry Headquarters in Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1946. Or was it? When Charley Lee Stillwater dies of an apparent heart attack at the Wyoming Home for Soldiers & Sailors, Walt Longmire is called in to try and make sense of a piece of a painting and a Florsheim shoebox containing a million dollars, sending the good sheriff on the trail of a dangerous art heist.

Craig Johnson has won multiple awards and earned starred reviews from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews for his New York Times best-selling Walt Longmire mysteries. Embarking on his eighth adventure in As the Crow Flies, Sheriff Longmire is searching the Cheyenne Reservation for a site to host his daughter’s wedding, when he sees a woman fall to her death. Teaming up with beautiful tribal chief Lolo Long, Walt sets out to investigate the suspicious death.

Homicide is always an abomination, but there is something exceptionally disturbing about the victim discovered in a high, lonely place: a corpse with a mouth full of sand, abandoned at a crime scene seemingly devoid of tracks or useful clues. Though it goes against his better judgment, Navajo tribal police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn cannot help but suspect the hand of a supernatural killer.

A dying man is murdered. A rich man's wife agrees to pay $3,000 for the return of a stolen box of rocks. A series of odd, inexplicable events is haunting Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police and drawing him alone into the Bad Country of the merciless Southwest, where nothing good can survive...including Chee. Because an assassin waits for him there, protecting a 30-year-old vision that greed has sired and blood has nourished. And only one man will walk away.

Spur Award-winner Craig Johnson has garnered critical acclaim for his Walt Longmire mysteries. In this riveting seventh entry, Wyoming’s Absaroka County sheriff, Walt Longmire, is pushed beyond his limits. When three hardened convicts escape FBI custody in a mountain blizzard, an armed psychopath leads them up Big Horn Mountain. As Longmire struggles to track their treacherous ascent, he’ll need all the help he can get from the tribal spirits of the towering summit.

Anna Horn is always looking over her shoulder. For the bullies who torment her, for the entitled visitors at the reservation’s casino…and for the nameless, disembodied entity that stalks her every step—an ancient tribal myth come-to-life, one that’s intent on devouring her whole. With strange and sinister happenings occurring around the casino, Anna starts to suspect that not all the horrors on the reservation are old. As girls begin to go missing and the tribe scrambles to find answers, Anna struggles with her place on the rez.

As an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her days in Rhode Island trying to protect the land's indigenous past, even as she’s escaping her own. While Syd is dedicated to her job, she’s haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma hometown 15 years ago. Though she swore she’d never go back, the past comes calling. When a skull is found near the crime scene of her youth, just as her sister, Emma Lou, vanishes, Syd knows she must return home.

When Lolo Long's niece, Jaya, begins receiving death threats, Tribal Police Chief Long calls on Absaroka County Sheriff Walt Longmire along with Henry Standing Bear as lethal backup. Jaya Longshot Long is the phenom of the Lame Deer Lady Stars High School basketball team and is following in the steps of her older sister, who disappeared a year previously, a victim of the scourge of missing Native Woman in Indian Country.

Against the backdrop of a never-colonized North America, a broken Ojibwe detective embarks on an emotional and twisting journey toward solving two murders, rediscovering family, and finding himself.

Two Native American boys have vanished into thin air, leaving a pool of blood behind them. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police has no choice but to suspect the very worst, since the blood that stains the parched New Mexican ground once flowed through the veins of one of the missing, a young ZuNi. But his investigation into a terrible crime is being complicated by an important archaeological dig and a steel hypodermic needle.

A tenacious Maori detective, Hana Westerman juggles single motherhood, endemic prejudice, and the pressures of her career in Auckland CIB. Led to a crime scene by a mysterious video, she discovers a man ritualistically hanging in a secret room and a puzzling inward-curving inscription. Delving into the investigation after a second, apparently unrelated, death, she uncovers a chilling connection to an historic crime: 160 years before, during the brutal and bloody British colonization of New Zealand, a troop of colonial soldiers unjustly executed a Maori Chief.

In Craig Johnson's latest mystery, Depth of Winter, an international hit man and the head of one of the most vicious drug cartels in Mexico has kidnapped Walt's beloved daughter, Cady, to auction her off to his worst enemies, of which there are many. The American government is of limited help and the Mexican one even less. Walt heads into the 110-degree heat of the Northern Mexican desert alone, one man against an army.

At a moonlit Indian ruin where "thieves of time" ravage sacred ground in the name of profit, a noted anthropologist vanishes while on the verge of making a startling, history-altering discovery. Amid stolen goods and desecrated bones, two corpses are discovered, shot by bullets fitting the gun of the missing scientist. There are modern mysteries buried in despoiled ancient places, and Navajo Tribal Policemen Leaphorn and Chee must plunge into the past to unearth an astonishing truth and a cold-hearted killer.

Dreams tell old man Paul T'Sosi he's dying. So why is Navajo trickster Magpie trying to tell him a far more terrifying secret? Hungry for revenge, Ma'iitsoh Dine', the Navajo Wolf, is out for blood. Summoning his darkest powers, the Witch of Ganado circles tribal investigator Charlie Yazzie's young son and close friends. Some may survive the witch's evil vendetta, but others will die to settle an old score.

Theirs is a fight to right the wrongs inflicted on them by "the white settlers." They know they are too small to take on the entire country, but they don't need to. Over a few tension-filled days as the battles rages over abundant energy resources, the frantic prime minister can only watch as the insurrection paralyzes the country. But when energy-dependent Americans discover the southward flow of Canadian hydroelectricity, oil, and natural gas is halted, they do not remain passive.

For Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, the case begins when he finds a pair of boots in the rabbit brush beside a wilderness trail. The boots' owner lies nearby, his palms and soles "scalped" in what appears to be a witch's scavenging. The federal investigators tell Chee to mind his own business. But a series of disturbing events draws Chee into a dangerous web of intrigue spun by Navajo sorcery and white greed.

When a young girl goes missing, the ghosts of the past collide with her family’s secrets in a mesmerizing Native American Southern Gothic When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her family is left shattered, struggling to navigate the darkness of grief and unanswered...

Tony Hillerman's best-selling reservation series occupies a unique place in the world of mystery novels. By combining Native American lore and history with suspenseful crime stories, he enlightens and entertains his many fans. Hunting Badger takes you to the Navajo reservation where police sergeant Jim Chee is facing a thorny dilemma. One year ago, Sgt. Chee was part of an FBI search for two cop killers. The men were never caught, and Chee has always blamed police rivalry for the failure. Now several commandos have robbed a casino on the Ute reservation.

Hot-blooded Georgiana Stockwell will break a man's heart while he's eating out of her hand. Moving from the East to join her schoolteacher sister in the rugged wilds of Tonto Basin, Arizona, Georgiana makes quite an impression. Despite her sister's best efforts, Georgiana creates a culture clash as her modern, free-spirited personality comes up against the code of the West, the unwritten law of the range that everyone is expected to follow.