Native American Mysteries

Métis journalist Leo Desroches has just been released from jail. Fortunately for him, he is re-hired at the paper to write a popular column about crime. It’s summer; the city is hot and buzzing with mosquitoes, and it’s on track for a record number of homicides. Called to the scene of an apparent overdose of a young Native man in the inner city, Leo witnesses some rocks falling out of the body bag, and he picks them up. At first he believes they are crack cocaine but discovers that the rocks are really rough diamonds.

With the aid of the Native American Shaman Conawago, Duncan McCallum has begun to heal from the massacre of his Highland clan by the British. But his new life is shattered when he and Conawago discover a dying Virginian officer nailed to an Indian shrine tree. To their horror, the authorities arrest Conawago and schedule his hanging. As Duncan begins a desperate search for the truth, he finds himself in a maelstrom of deception and violence.

Fish and Wildlife State Trooper Gabriel Hawke encounters a hunter with an illegal tag. The name on the tag belongs to the Wallowa County District Attorney and the man holding the tag isn’t the public defender. As Hawke digs to find out if the DA is corrupt, the hunter’s body is found. Zeroing in on the DA, Hawke finds he has more suspects than the DA and more deaths than the hunter.

Who owns what is traditionally considered sacred? Can the Catholic Church legally conspire with the federal government to steal the most sacrosanct of Native American holy places? Holes in the Sky, the second in the series Zeb Hanks: Small Town Sheriff with Big Time Troubles, explores these questions in a clash of cultures mixed with mysterious deaths.

From the moment Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés first found and confronted them, the Aztecs have fascinated the world, and they continue to hold a unique place both culturally and in pop culture. Nearly 500 years after the Spanish conquered their mighty empire, the Aztecs are often remembered today for their major capital, Tenochtitlan, as well as being fierce conquerors of the Valley of Mexico who often engaged in human sacrifice rituals.

For Jonathon Roth and his family, a vacation in Cozumel became a nightmare. Pawns in a deadly ritual, Roth and his children barely escaped with their lives, and with the secrets of mastermind Jacob Calakmul. Calakmul’s endgame: to fulfill the Jaguar Prophecies—the foretelling of an inevitable Armageddon, one that will destroy entire nations. The key to stopping it is to retrieve an ancient codex—if Roth can decipher it.

Once a land of Pueblo dwellers, the town of San Geronimo Peak, New Mexico, is prime ski country. PI Howard Moon Deer and ex-cop Jack Wilder are headed there to meet their first client - a former US senator and the ski slope's owner. Instead, they find his body - and a murder case to solve.

On a sunny July day, Jennifer becomes lost in a sacred wilderness area and stumbles upon evidence of terror and murder. As darkness falls, she learns of crimes that modern day tribal police know only too well - insertion of meth on reservations by cartels, Middle Eastern jihadists laundering money in Indian casinos, and the secret creatures in the sacred areas of the reservation that the Indians won't talk about. A night of terror begins for Siyapu (white girl) Jennifer Kruger.

A tribe will do anything to protect their own. Described as a modern day Dances with Wolves, Cold River Rising is unlike any novel you've heard before. While on spring break from college, Native American Tara Eagle is kidnapped in a foreign land. Her tribe closes its borders, declares war, and sends an unlikely team to rescue her. They are joined by others.

For FBI Agent Zack Tolliver, a pleasure trip to the Central Coast of California turns into dangerous business when he becomes immersed in a case involving drug smuggling, rival cartels, murder, and an ancient myth. The clues add up, the victims pile up, the mystery grows, the danger deepens.

On the banks of the Missouri River, the town of Yellow Earth and the Three Nations reservation prepare for an invasion - the ground beneath their feet is loaded with readily frackable shale oil and the minions of corporate energy are rushing to extract it. Tribal Chairman Harleigh Kildeer welcomes Big Oil with open arms, while county sheriff Will Crowder has to deal with the overnight influx of roughnecks, truckers, drug dealers, and sex workers.

Loki Redmond is positive her grandfather's 100 acre farm in Mississippi will be the perfect place for Jake Savior to heal after the murder of his wife and his banishment from law enforcement before they begin their partnership in Redmond Private Investigations. But fate has other plans. The discovery of a month-old baby and young girl with no memory of her name, running from a man she calls The Devil, plunges them into danger.

FBI Special Agent Anna Turnipseed, a Modoc Indian from California, and Bureau of Indian Affairs Investigator Emmett Parker, a Comanche from Oklahoma, are a team, sent by the Feds wherever there are problems in tribal territory.

After four women disappear from the Taos Pueblo reservation, Deputy Eva “Lightning Dance” Duran dives into the case. For her, it’s personal. Among the missing is her best friend, Paloma, a heroin addict who left behind an eighteen-year-old son. Eva senses a lack of interest from the department as she embarks on the investigation. But their reluctance only fuels her fire. Eva teams up with tribal police officer and longtime friend Cruz “Wolf Song” Romero to tackle a mystery that could both ruin her reputation and threaten her standing in the tribe.

In the dense jungles of 1530 Peru, King Manco Inca finds himself in a hell that he cannot escape. The evil and vicious Pizarro Brothers and their fellow Spanish conquistadors have wreaked havoc on his lands and have conquered his kingdom. A violently real portrayal of the Spanish Conquest of the New World, Brothers and Kings is an epic historical-fiction thriller that presents men at their best and their most cruel.

Deadfall tracks Charlie Yazzie, Thomas Begay, and Harley Ponyboy into unfamiliar territory. When a family member unexpectedly dies, a debilitating sense of loss overcomes our friends on the reservation. The ties that have bound them begin to unravel. What witch's evil is at work? Is the bond forever broken? Or is there a connection to the ancient past that might bring this malevolent aura to an end?

When US Fish & Wildlife Ranger Nick Drake gets a beautiful and impetuous new supervisor, he quickly becomes pulled into a physical and emotional cauldron after she orders him to guide her down a dangerous and deadly river. As rapids roar and passions roil, Nick must battle waterfalls and whirlpools, an unearthly predator killing anything that ventures into its realm, and doubts about his frayed marriage following the adoption of a psychologically scarred boy.

Nick Drake confronts a double-feature of murder and mysticism when Sheriff Pudge Warbler enlists him to catch a killer among the movie stars and film crew turning Harney County into a celluloid version of the Old West. At the same time, he runs afoul of a sinister gold mining company after finding an old prospector shot in the back.

Shortly after his mother is killed in a car accident, Lucas leaves foster care at Wounded Arrow and returns home to Havelock to live with his dad. At his elementary school, Lucas stumbles upon three Muslim boys forcefully recruiting a young Muslim boy to carry out a school shooting. Lucas intervenes on behalf of Ali Kharim and comes away from the encounter carrying a pistol with scorpions engraved on its pearl handles. Little does he know that inserted into the butt of the gun is a flash drive.

David is a blue-collar man, spending his days managing the Albuquerque Wastewater Utility plant, and nights ruminating over his painful past. Not much of import happens in his world, and that's just fine by him. That is, until a severed hand is found among the filtered debris of one of the waste filtration tanks. Thinking a few hours of paperwork will be all it takes to clear the episode from David's life, fate sends a beautiful Sheriff's Deputy named Gina, along with a series of events that drag him deep into something more sinister than he ever could have imagined.