Native Mystery Fiction

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.

It's a week before Christmas when wealthy businessman Tom Underwood disappears into thin air - with more than enough people wanting him dead. New police recruit Kala Stonechild, who has left her northern Ontario detachment to join a specialized Ottawa crime unit, is tasked with returning Underwood home in time for the holidays. Stonechild, who is from a First Nations reserve, is a lone wolf who is used to surviving on her wits. Her new boss has his hands full controlling her, his team, and an investigation that keeps threatening to go off track.

A teacher is dead, a boy is missing, and a councilwoman has put a lot of pressure on Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee to find her grandson. Sitting on a rooftop watching sacred clowns perform their antics in a Pueblo ceremony, Chee spots the boy. Then, suddenly, the crowd is in commotion. One of the clowns has been savagely murdered. Without a single clue, Chee and Leaphorn must follow a serpentine trail through the Indian clans and nations, seeking the thread that links two brutal murders, a missing teenager, a band of lobbyists trying to put a toxic dump site on Pueblo land, and an invaluable memento given to the tribes.

Joe Leaphorn may be long retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, but his detective skills are still sharp, honed by his work as a private detective. His experience will be essential to solve a compelling new case: finding the birth parents of a woman who was raised by a bilagáana family but believes she is Diné based on one solid clue, an old photograph with a classic Navajo child’s blanket.

Kari James, Urban Native, is a fan of heavy metal, ripped jeans, Stephen King novels, and dive bars. She spends most of her time at her favorite spot in Denver, the White Horse. When her cousin Debby finds an old family bracelet that once belonged to Kari’s mother, it inadvertently calls up both her mother’s ghost and a monstrous entity, and her willful ignorance about her past is no longer sustainable. Haunted by visions of her mother and hunted by this mysterious creature, Kari must search for what happened to her mother all those years ago.

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.

The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.

Reunited by a grave robber and a corpse, Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is trying to determine the identity of a murder victim, while Officer Jim Chee is arresting Smithsonian conservator Henry Highhawk for ransacking the sacred bones of his ancestors. But with each peeled-back layer, it becomes shockingly clear that these two cases are mysteriously connected - and that others are pusuing Highhawk, with lethal intentions. And the search for answers to a deadly puzzle is pulling Leaphorn and Chee into the perilous arena of superstition, ancient ceremony, and living gods.

Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. Her excellent photography skills have cracked many cases—she is almost supernaturally good at capturing details. In fact, Rita has been hiding a secret: she sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues that other investigators overlook. As a lone portal back to the living for traumatized spirits, Rita is terrorized by nagging ghosts who won’t let her sleep and who sabotage her personal life.

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.

Jacques Rouleau has moved to Kingston to look after his father and take up the position of head of the town's Criminal Investigations Division. One hot week in late September, university student Leah Sampson is murdered in her apartment. In another corner of the city, Della Munroe is raped by her husband. At first the crimes appear unrelated, but as Sergeant Rouleau and his new team of officers dig into the women's pasts, they discover unsettling coincidences.

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.

Walt thinks he might find the answers he's looking for among the ruins of an old Native American boarding school—an institution designed to strip Native children of their heritage. He has been haunted by the image of the Fort Pratt Industrial Indian Training School ever since he first saw a faded postcard picturing a hundred boys in uniform, in front of a large, ominous building—a postcard that was given to him by Jimmy Lane, the father of Jeanie One Moon.

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.

Having no choice but to abandon his adopted life and return to his roots, Scarberry finds himself dropped into a situation far more harrowing than he ever could have imagined. Allied with a single sheriff's deputy - a young woman he knew only briefly in his youth who is fighting battles of her own - the two face a network of illegal gun runners, apathetic bureaucracy, and federal agency, ultimately squaring off with the very thing Scarberry's been trying to avoid for so long....

The year is 1870, and Fool's Crow, so called after he killed the chief of the Crows during a raid, has a vision at the annual Sun Dance ceremony. The young warrior sees the end of the Indian way of life and the choice that must be made: resistance or humiliating accommodation.

A lost gold mine, a corpse in an abandoned pickup truck, and an eerie wailing heard on Halloween are among the delicious plot elements Tony Hillerman cooks up in his 15th novel featuring Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. The two Navajo cops, one old and one young—who originally debuted in separate series but have been collaborating for many books now—are among the most engaging, fully human characters in crime fiction. As The Wailing Wind beautifully demonstrates, there's only one Tony Hillerman ... and he's at the top of his game.

Tony Hillerman's mysteries offer a combination of Native-American lore and intriguing crimes that has made each one an instant best-seller. A wealthy Washington businessman will do anything to protect a covert operation that earns him millions of dollars. But when his activities attract the attention of reservation police, his power becomes as unstable as the desert wind.

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.

John Henry Cole is an operative of Ike Kelly's Detective Agency, based out of Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory. Returning to Cheyenne from what had been a deadly assignment in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, Cole has decided that he has no alternative but to resign from the agency and pursue a different line of work. However, in Cheyenne, Cole learns that Ike Kelly has been murdered and his body burned in a fire that destroyed both the agency office and the shop next door.