Native Mystery Fiction

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.

In Agatha Christie’s “The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan”, Poirot and Hastings are called on to solve the case of Mrs. Opalsen’s missing set of pearls, apparently stolen during a stay at the Grand Metropolitan Hotel. The two suspects are Mrs. Opalsen’s maid and the hotel chambermaid, but both blame the other. Who is the real thief?

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.

Shandra Higheagle is asked to juror an art exhibition on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. After an altercation at the exhibition, the chairwoman of the event, Shandra’s friend, arrives home with torn clothes, scratches, and stating she tried to save an angry artist who fell over a cliff. Shandra and Ryan begin piecing together information to figure out if the friend did try to save the artist, or helped him over the edge.

An icy chill foretells a harsh winter for the Navajo people—and for perpetually down on his luck Harley Ponyboy the situation grows increasingly desperate. What evil is this that dogs his every step? When a lucky lottery ticket comes his way, Harley uses the new resources to search for a lost love—only to find she has fallen to appalling depths. His stubborn resolve to help puts him on a collision course with her abusive companion . . . and with his own mortality.

In Agatha Christie’s short story “The Kidnapped Prime Minister”, Poirot investigates the mysterious disappearance of the British prime minister during wartime. Apparently carjacked on the way to a peace conference, Poirot must overcome subterfuge and misdirection to solve the mystery.

At the reservation to make final arrangements for her upcoming wedding, potter Shandra Higheagle gets caught up in the murder of a young woman about to turn her life around. Having no jurisdiction on the reservation, Detective Ryan Greer pulls in favors from friends in the FBI to make sure there is no delay in their wedding.

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.

Shandra Higheagle is digging up clay for her renowned pottery when she scoops up a boot attached to a skeleton. She calls in Weippe County detective Ryan Greer. The body is decades old and discovered to be Shandra’s employee’s old flame. Ryan immediately pegs Shandra’s employee for the murderer, but Shandra knows in her heart that the woman everyone calls Crazy Lil couldn’t have killed anyone, let alone a man she loved.

Once again, Shandra Higheagle finds herself a suspect in a murder investigation when an ex-lover is found murdered on a Huckleberry ski run. A past she'd planned to never divulge now must be shared with the first man she's trusted, Detective Ryan Greer. Ryan puts his job in jeopardy when he's booted from the case and uses all resources plus a few extra to prove Shandra is innocent. The information leads them down a road of blackmail and betrayal of the ugliest kind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maggie Tall Bear Sloan, half Irish, half Yurok, and 100 percent gutsy, is a retired criminologist who shape-shifts into the Pukkekwerek, the Yurok nation’s monster-killing raven. After she brings down a cannibalistic child murderer possessed by a manitou, Maggie, and her lover, Jake Lubbock, a former sheriff, move from the mountains in Northern California to a desert town in Southern California. All is well for Maggie and Jake until the local sheriff shows them photos of a dentist, his wife, and teenage son, roasted over separate fires on spits, their flesh cannibalized.

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.

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.

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.