Native Mystery Fiction

Fish and Wildlife State Trooper Gabriel Hawke's job is to find a missing family in the Eagle Cap Wilderness. After finding the parents murdered, can he find a little girl on the run? Hawke is an expert tracker, but he isn’t the only one looking for the child. Even leaving the mountain, the girl isn’t safe. The murderers are looking for something - something they believe the child possesses.

Prepare for thrills and chills as three acclaimed authors unite in Twisted Fate, a spine-tingling collection of stories: Hunted by Traci Hunter Abramson; Death House by Gregg Luke; and Haunting Reminders by Stephanie Black.

Harney County, Oregon, 1968: Nick Drake has a chest full of medals and enough demons to fill a duffel bag. He's been trained to kill but was never retrained to rejoin society. Drake flees to the lonesome high desert in search of redemption and takes a job patrolling wildlife refuges where the only conflicts are keeping out stray cows and ticketing poachers. But then he stumbles across a girl's body ritually placed in a gully. Her murder is only the beginning, and Drake must face humanity's heart of darkness once again if he's to stop a killer from turning even more gullies into graves.

Why abduct a small child from the heart of Queensland’s Channel Country? Does the mother know or even suspect the real reason? Being 400 kilometers from the nearest lone police officer, Myall Downs’ own stationhands must act. Instinctively, Adam Mann, a tenacious, determined aboriginal stockman and known black-tracker, relentlessly chases the villains, dogging them across some of Queensland’s harshest and most beautiful terrain.

When Louise Root, a new client of Cecil Younger, is found murdered, the private investigator finds himself in the middle of an environmental law violation that has deadly repercussions. Cecil finds he is unable to leave behind Root, especially after her ex-lover Hannah asks him for help. On top of it all, Global Mining, the company that runs the gold mine where Root's body was found, hires Younger to get the dirt on an environmentalist who has a connection to the victim. In the midst of all this, Cecil's personal life is fraying.

Cecil Younger, local Alaskan investigator, is neither good at his job nor great at staying sober. When an old Tlingit woman, unimpressed by the police's investigation, hires him to discover why her son, a big-game guide, was murdered, he takes the case without much conviction that he'll discover anything new.

In "Master and Man," Bobbie is a black man who can outride, outfight, and outshoot any white man in the mountain desert. His unwavering moral code serves as a model for his often cruel and dissolute white master.

It's 1952, and Jasper isn't allowed to ask questions or make a fuss. He's lucky to even have a home and must keep his mouth shut and his ears open to stay in his uncle's good graces. No one knows where his mother went or whether she's coming back. Desperate to see her again, he must take matters into his own hands. From the farm, he embarks on a treacherous search that will take him to the squalid hideaways of Detroit and back again, through tawdry taverns, peep shows, and gambling houses.

Rodeo Grace Garnet lives alone, save for his old dog, in a remote corner of Arizona known to locals as the Hole. He doesn't get many visitors, but a body found near his home has drawn police attention to his front door. The victim is not one of the many illegal immigrants who risk their lives to cross the border just south of the Hole, but is instead a member of one of the local Indian tribes.

After five years of virtual banishment because he sold out his small outfit to the Middle Arizona Cattle Company, giving it a foothold on the Mesa Grande range, violent-tempered Joe Bonnyman is summoned back to Lodgepole by his father when it appears that a cattle war between the syndicate and the various rangers is imminent. During his short stay in town, Joe has an unpleasant meeting with Ed Merrill, the brother of a girl Joe had once courted.

This white-knuckled tale is about Idaho game warden Charley Cove struggling to stop a bloody string of deer shot and left in the snow. He's stymied by a lackadaisical prosecutor and a questionable deputy - the tug of two cultures running through his veins seem to be pulling him in different directions. Cove uncovers evidence that ties the shooter to crimes against people, and unknown to the warden, his bad guy is about to come unglued and drag his bloodbath into a nightmare for a two-legged victim.

Born in Brooklyn, Sammy Gregg is small in stature and naive to the ways of the world, yet headstrong and resolute to save enough money to marry Susie Mitchell. Gregg calculates that he needs $15‚000 and figures he can earn enough in six months out west. Although he is a small man who knows nothing of fighting‚ guns‚ or horses‚ he takes his $5‚000 in savings and heads west‚ arriving in Munson‚ a tough, lawless town.

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.

A Study in Scarlet is a detective mystery novel written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, introducing his new characters, "consulting detective" Sherlock Holmes and his friend and chronicler, Dr. John Watson, who later became two of the most famous characters in literature. Conan Doyle wrote the story in 1886, and it was published the following year.

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.

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.

Sam Cloudstone is a full-blooded Comanche in today's world. He's an author, a songwriter, a photographer, a bartender, and a bounty hunter. One day he accidentally crosses paths with Melissa Steinhardt, a beautiful and impetuous "damsel in distress", and his life changes forever! Attempting to help her involves him in a 70-year-old mystery that pits the two of them against the FBI, the CIA, and a billionaire drug lord. They end up in a chase across Texas, each new destination dictated by solving the riddle preceding it.

Sheriff Zeb Hanks has his hands full when sociopath Jimmie Joe Walker, recently released from an Arizona state prison, masterminds a devious plan to make himself filthy rich. His plan involves Ángel Gomez, a down-on-his-luck half Mescalero Apache/half Mexican. Ángel's alcoholism and far-fetched dreams make him an unwitting dupe in Jimmie Joe's plans, which end up endangering Ángel's own life, as well as the lives of those he loves.

Brandon Walker, once the sheriff of Pima County, Arizona, no longer feels he has purpose. A reluctant retiree living in the long shadow of his wife, Diana Ladd, a successful author of true-crime books, he is bored with life. Salvation comes with an invitation to join The Last Chance, an exclusive fraternity of former cops and forensic experts who look into unsolved murders.