Native American Fiction Mystery

When tribal police officer Bernadette Manuelito arrives to speak at a program for at-risk teens, she discovers chaos. Everyone is concerned about a beloved instructor who went out into the wilds of the rugged lava wilderness bordering Ramah Navajo Reservation to find a missing girl. The instructor vanished somewhere in the volcanic landscape known as El Malpais. The instructor's disappearance mirrors a long-ago search that may be connected to a case in which the legendary Joe Leaphorn played a crucial role.

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.

Inside Alaska's biggest national park, surrounding the town of Niniltna, a gold mining company has started buying up land. The residents of the Park, are uneasy. "But gold is up to nine hundred dollars an ounce," is the refrain of Talia Macleod, the popular Alaskan skiing champ the company hired to improve their relations with Alaskans. And she promises much needed jobs to the locals. But before she can make her way to every village in the area to make her case at town meetings and village breakfasts, there are two murders—one a long-standing mine opponent, and Ms. Macleod herself.

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s own nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.

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.

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 snowmelt has sent floodwaters down to the fields of the Red River Valley, dragging the body of an unidentified Native woman into the town of Ada. The only evidence the medical examiner recovers is a torn piece of paper inside her bra: a hymnal written in English and Ojibwe. Cash Blackbear, a 19-year-old Ojibwe woman, sometimes helps Sheriff Wheaton, her guardian, on his investigations. Now she knows her search for justice for this anonymous victim will take her to the White Earth Reservation, a place she once called home.

Henry Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American—a native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage seems to drift further and further away. Park's harsh Korean upbringing has taught him to hide his emotions, to remember everything he learns, and most of all to feel an overwhelming sense of alienation. In other words, it has shaped him as a natural spy.

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.

Hundreds of thousands of devotees will cheer the return of Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. The Navajo policemen, are brought together by the death of a man on Ship Rock, almost 1700 feet above the desert floor. The fallen man had sprawled on the ledge under the peak of Ship Rock mountain for eleven years - visited only by the ravens who had picked his bones bare and scattered his rock-climbing gear. Through the memory of those who had known him, emerges an understanding of the fallen man, who had been given everything and found it was not enough.

Alaska aviation entrepreneur Finn Grant died in the fiery crash of his Piper Super Cub. Someone sabotaged his engine, and virtually everyone in southwestern Alaska has a motive, including his betrayed wife, his bullied children, and Liam’s wife, bush pilot Wyanet Chouinard. With few places to turn, Liam asks his former mentor Niniltna post commander Sergeant Jim Chopin, for help, and Jim quickly brings Kate onto the case. Working undercover as - of all things - a waitress at Bill’s Bar and Grill, Kate learns over beer and burgers that Grant’s business had expanded meteorically over the last two years.

Though he’s officially retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, Joe Leaphorn occasionally helps his former colleagues Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito crack particularly puzzling crimes. But there is that rare unsolved investigation that haunts every lawman, including the legendary Leaphorn. Joe still hasn’t let go of his “last case”—a mystery involving a priceless Navajo rug that was supposedly destroyed in a fire. Nine years later, what looks like the same one-of-a-kind rug turns up in a magazine spread, and the man who showed Joe the photo has gone missing.

Sergeant Jim Chee’s vacation to beautiful Antelope Canyon and Lake Powell has a deeper purpose. He’s on a quest to unravel a sacred mystery his mentor, the Legendary Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, stumbled across decades earlier. Chee’s journey takes a deadly turn when, after a prayerful visit to the sacred Rainbow Bridge, he spots a body floating in the lake. The dead man, a Navajo with a passion for the canyon’s ancient rock art, lived a life filled with many secrets. Discovering why he died and who was responsible involves Chee in an investigation that puts his own life at risk.

A man is murdered in Seattle's Pioneer Square. The killer is caught just blocks away, blood still on his hands. When it's discovered that both killer and victim belong to the same Native American tribe, the tribe asserts jurisdiction, and homicide DA Dave Brunelle has to prosecute the case in their tribal court. It's bad enough when the defense attorney claims the killing was justified under the ancient custom of "blood revenge". It gets worse when blood revenge turns into a blood feud.

A FRIEND OF THE COURT A Novella within the Time Drifters Series: Today, Tomorrow, or Yesterday? and Time Drifters Lawman Dutch Clemens, of the Time Drifters series, wrote a novel called A Friend of the Court before his time travelling adventures. He gifted publishing rights to his best friend, Frank Sharp, who published the novel and became a best selling author, with a few key changes, of course. In A Friend of the Court, join Detective James Maston, a seasoned investigator with an unbreakable marriage, and Detective Abby Thornton, his eager partner, in a spellbinding tale of friendship, ...

Hot-blooded Georgiana Stockwell will break a man's heart while he's eating out of her hand. Moving from the East to join her schoolteacher sister in the rugged wilds of Tonto Basin, Arizona, Georgiana makes quite an impression. Despite her sister's best efforts, Georgiana creates a culture clash as her modern, free-spirited personality comes up against the code of the West, the unwritten law of the range that everyone is expected to follow.

They are just about as bad and evil as outlaw gangs come. But in the end, they finally go straight.

A phone call in 1975 changes Moon Mathias’s life forever, as a voice on the line tells him his dead brother’s baby daughter—a child Moon never knew existed—is waiting for him in Southeast Asia. A task he believes beyond his meager talents is pulling Moon to Vietnam. In a chilling world of mystery and silence, disguise and deception, he’ll risk everything for the sake of one little girl—and discover a Moon Mathias who’s a better man than he ever thought he could be.

Three shotgun blasts rip through the side of Officer Jim Chee's trailer as the Navajo Tribal Policeman sleeps. He survives, but the inexplicable attack has raised disturbing questions about a lawman once beyond reproach. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn wonders why Chee was a target and what connection the assault has to a series of gruesome murders that has been plaguing the reservation. But the investigation is leading them both into a nightmare of ritual, witchcraft, and blood . . . and into the dark and mystical domain of evil beings of Navajo legend, the "skinwalkers."

An unexpected death on a lonely road outside of Utah’s Bears Ears National Park raises questions for Navajo Tribal Police officers Jim Chee and Bernadette Manuelito. Why would a seasoned outdoorsman and well-known paleontologist freeze to death within walking distance of his car? A second death brings more turmoil. Who is the unidentified man killed during a home invasion where nothing seems to have been taken? Why was he murdered? An illicit business, a fossilized jaw bone, hints of witchcraft, and a mysterious disappearance during a blizzard add to the peril.