Native Mystery Fiction

An ancient, disabled girl holds the key to unlock two modern day murders on the Dine Bikeyah. Archeology and murder entwine in Chappell's latest Canyon Lands thriller.

The weekend before her coffee shop's Grand Opening in the small Wisconsin town of Horizon, former Chicago marketing exec and hereditary Wiccan, Ellie Gooden, opens the back door to her new business...and finds murder. The former owner is dead in the middle of her kitchen, tied to a chair, covered in syrup and feathers, with a butcher knife sticking out of his chest. A stranger in a new town, Ellie climbs immediately to the top of a suspect list of one. To make matters worse, someone is vandalizing both her new shop and her new home.

Choctaw Detective Perry Antelope has been with her partner, Sophia Burns, for only six months. Perry is a seasoned investigator while the ex-Olympian shot putter Sophia is a former street-smart police officer. Together, they are an intrepid pair with an established record of success. But when Perry and Sophia are called to investigate the disappearance of Dels Billy, a beloved women’s Indian Horse Relay rider, they quickly realize that it’s not as cut-and-dry as anything they’ve faced before.

Ben Pecos has the opportunity to work in Albuquerque on a research project for the Indian Health Service, and his fiancée Julie Conlin decides to join him when she snags an invitation for the couple to stay at the lavish home of an old family friend, Connie CdeBaca, who is the head of a family of successful land developers. But Connie harbors a deep secret she has never told anyone. Ben and Julie are hardly settled when people begin dying, and they find themselves swept into the midst of another mystery.

In Agatha Christie’s short story “The Case of the Missing Will,” Poirot must help clever student Violet Marsh meet the terms of an unusual will by her Uncle Andrew. She must live in his house for a month and “prove her wits” if she is ever to receive his fortune. But is there another will?

Time is not on Faye Longchamp’s side. She and her husband Joe are working near the mouth of the Mississippi, researching archaeological sites soon to be swamped by oil. The Deepwater Horizon disaster has morphed her run-of-the-mill contract job into a task that might swamp her fledgling company. It isn’t helping that an injured babysitter has left Faye to work with a toddler underfoot.

It's unlike Erica Davidson's dad to meddle in other people's business, much less write an anonymous letter to a beautiful, young stranger. But that is exactly what Dean Davidson has done. Days later, the girl is found dead at the bottom of Cimarron Falls. Erica, a high-powered attorney in Nashville, travels to the idyllic town of Ridgway, Colorado, to help her parents navigate these shocking developments. She is immediately swept into a series of events that holds everything from closely guarded secrets, to possible murder, to the plot of a John Wayne movie shot in the area.

After a security guard is found dead and another wounded at the Children's Museum of Science and History in Norman, Oklahoma, Detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Chris Pierson are summoned to investigate. They find no fingerprints, no footprints, and no obvious means to enter the locked building.

The Conquistadors Trilogy is a sweeping historical fiction epic that explores the violent and horrific Spanish Conquest of the New World from the years 1527 to 1542. Told through the eyes of a Spanish soldier named Sardina, each journey, from the jungles of Peru, through the vast Arizona deserts, and finally to the great Mississippi River, brutally reveals the traumatic events of the Spanish Conquest of the Natives of the Americas. But each story also depicts the beauty and bravery of these people, and the unyielding courage of each tribe, kingdom, and village.

Lakota beauty Kinton Brulee just snagged an Oregon state deputy fire-marshal job. She thinks she can handle PTSD, and doubters in her male-dominated profession while raising a disabled son and at-risk niece. But when she investigates a hemp farm blaze near home, she races to outwit a killer burning to destroy her.

Outside of Choteau, Montana are three crosses on a plateau, called Priest Butte. The story goes that 160 years ago, Blackfeet warriors savagely murdered three priests. Or the story goes that priests tortured and killed three Blackfeet boys. Two stories. One history.

Oregon State Trooper Gabriel Hawke’s sister, Marion, is on a corporate retreat in Montana when she becomes a murder suspect. Running for her life from the real killer, she contacts Hawke for help. Hawke heads to Montana to find his sister and prove she isn’t a murderer. He hasn’t seen Marion in over 20 years but he knows she wouldn’t kill the man she was about to marry.

In 1988, a crumbling personal diary is unearthed near an Indian Reservation in North Dakota. The weathered pages reveal disturbing insights into the author's guilt-ridden mind. The journal, written by James Johansen in 1966, details his brief stay on a desolate Reservation. James is a middle-aged psychologist recruited from East Los Angeles who becomes too intrigued with the disjointed stories of a young Indian woman who appears at the door of his primitive two-room Counseling Center.

Journey through the colonies of 19th-century Australia with three stand-alone novels of love, loss, survival, and redemption. In 1806, a fateful decision sends Eleanor Marling from the salons of London to a prison ship bound for New South Wales. She is put to work at the female factory of Parramatta. English settler Grace Ashwell flees an abusive lover in Hobart Town, with six-year-old Violet in tow. Deep in the wilderness, they find a crude hut inhabited by an escaped convict long presumed dead.

When the local authorities tell State Trooper Gabriel Hawke’s mother to wait 72 hours before reporting a missing Umatilla woman, she calls her son and rallies members of the community to search. Hawke arrives at the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation and learns the single mother of a boy his mom watches would never leave her son. Angered over how the local officials respond to his investigating, Hawke teams up with a security guard at the Indian casino and an FBI agent.

Accident or homicide? State trooper Gabriel Hawke is called to a vehicle on fire. When the steam and smoke clears, a charred body is slumped over the steering wheel. The Muzzleloader Rendezvous has attendees from all over the Pacific Northwest, but it’s the local club that raises Hawke’s suspicions.

They say you can't go back home, but Marin Sinclair, end-of-life doula, never felt she had the right to call the Navajo reservation home, and she certainly never expected that answering a plea for help from a long ago friend would put her life in jeopardy. Dinetah, the Navajo Nation, holds some dark memories for her, but what about her life then would make anyone want to kill her?

A world-class scientist goes missing while consulting on a high-stakes project, the construction of an electric storage battery in the deserted pits of the old Kaiser Iron mines. Did this eccentric world-renown hydrologist simply wander off? Or was his fate more ominous? FBI Supervisory Agent Janice Hooper assigns Zack Tolliver, FBI, to the investigation. When someone plants a bomb in his Jeep the day he arrives, Zack realizes there is more at stake than anyone knew. Soon, he finds himself in a desperate duel with an unknown assassin who may very well be more than his match.

The nightmares never cease. Ever since I was a child I have struggled to deal with them. Each night a different horror takes shape, and I see it as if I was there. I wake from these terrifying dreams of another world in which I am running from the strangest visions of evil. Visions that can only exist in nightmares, yet they are all too real to me. Christian Sands is an FBI agent with a unique ability. When his ViCAP unit takes on another serial killer investigation, they soon find themselves in deeper than they bargained for. The killer seems to be ahead of them at every turn.

Andy Adams (1859-1935) was born to pioneer parents in Indiana, worked in Texas for a decade driving cattle, and settled in Colorado Springs, where he penned his cowboy narratives. The Log of a Cowboy chronicles a five-month drive of three thousand head of cattle from Brownsville, Texas, to the Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Montana. This classical work of fiction provides fascinating insights of everyday life on the Great Western Cattle Trail with a team of 12 cowhands, a cook, a horse wrangler and a foreman.