Native American Mysteries

A Zuni Indian boy dies in a bizarre ritual slaying - and his best friend, a Navajo youth, is missing. Navajo police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn tracks the friend from Zuni village to Navajo hogan, from anthropological dig to hippie commune, across the desert of New Mexico and Arizona.

A historic western that opens in 1873, a time when recession is forcing thousands westwards to recoup their fortunes. The West is tough, brutal and the Indian is the enemy. But when a white woman is raped, it is a half-breed Cheyenne who comes to the rescue. From the author of Jake and Upland Passage.

Inspired by true events: The Sioux call her Winter Hawk; the soldiers call her brother in arms; Captain Sommers calls her friend, but none of them see through her disguise. Posing as a seventeen-year-old boy named Abney, Morgan Jessup becomes a scout at Fort Laramie in order to clear her brothers’ names when they are framed for a multitude of crimes they didn’t commit. Armed only with a cryptic comment about an Indian Ring, a warning of danger, and the name Jason Sommers, Morgan begins her search right under her enemy’s nose. Investigating the Fort Laramie Indian Ring might be the ...

Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military.

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.

Who owns what is traditionally considered sacred? Can the Catholic Church legally conspire with the federal government to steal the most sacrosanct of Native American holy places? Holes in the Sky, the second in the series Zeb Hanks: Small Town Sheriff with Big Time Troubles, explores these questions in a clash of cultures mixed with mysterious deaths.

In this fast-paced sequel to the highly acclaimed Navajo Autumn, Charlie Yazzie and Thomas Begay encounter danger and intrigue on the nation's largest Indian reservation. Old and new characters emerge to unravel ongoing corruption in the upcoming Patsy Greyhorse murder trials, and an irascible Ute family and their shrewd ranch-woman neighbor become caught up in the plot to place certain tribal leaders above the law.

Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. She dreams of a fresh start at college, but when family tragedy strikes, Daunis puts her future on hold to look after her fragile mother. The only bright spot is meeting Jamie, the charming new recruit on her brother Levi’s hockey team. Yet even as Daunis falls for Jamie, she senses the dashing hockey star is hiding something. Everything comes to light when Daunis witnesses a shocking murder, thrusting her into an FBI investigation of a lethal new drug.

Join Chelsea, Francois, Ash, Dustin, Kelsi, and Jason as they return for their most daring expedition yet: tracking down the elusive Nantiinaq in the haunted ghost town of Portlock, Alaska. Legend has it that this desolate place was abandoned when the townsfolk fled in fear of the mysterious Nantiinaq, also known as Bigfoot. The Chugach Corporation has enlisted the expertise of Dr. Chelsea Buckley for a high-stakes mission. Their objective? To ensure Portlock's safety for redevelopment into a luxurious resort, complete with prime real estate plots for sale. Armed with state-of-the-art ...

"Heath's debut novel is gripping from the get-go." -Kirkus Reviews "Alaska is almost a character all on its own: beautiful, unpredictable, violent, and unforgiving. Broken Angels is a compelling debut by a talented new writer." -Elaine Ford, winner of the Michigan Literary Award. "This book was amazing, just as Burke brings New Orleans to life Heath puts Alaska into your soul." -Judy Smrdel "Heath has tapped his intimate knowledge of Alaska, its people, its coastal communities and its interior uniqueness and crafted a character-rich, page-turning, murder mystery." -An Alaskan She stares at ...

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.

After the disappearance of Cecilia Edakee’s cousin, and the confusion over which one of the law enforcement agencies has jurisdiction over the investigation, Sandy and Ben join forces with Cecilia and her cousin Bea to locate the missing woman. The rag-tag investigative team is baffled by a lack of evidence and must follow any trail they can to gather clues. This leads them to Albuquerque, Grants and, finally, the Navajo Nation to pull the pieces of this mystery together. To complicate matters, Sandy is pregnant with Ben’s first child and he is concerned that the pressure from sleuthing...

Anna Horn is always looking over her shoulder. For the bullies who torment her, for the entitled visitors at the reservation’s casino…and for the nameless, disembodied entity that stalks her every step—an ancient tribal myth come-to-life, one that’s intent on devouring her whole. With strange and sinister happenings occurring around the casino, Anna starts to suspect that not all the horrors on the reservation are old. As girls begin to go missing and the tribe scrambles to find answers, Anna struggles with her place on the rez.

For over twenty five years, The House of Three Murders has squatted, abandoned and decaying, deep inside a dense mesquite and tamarisk thicket in the middle of the vast Mojave Desert. The infamous house was the site of gruesome and bloody multiple murders. The murders have gradually passed into barely-remembered Mojave Desert legend, but the house remains, foreboding, forlorn and nearly forgotten. Then, on a moonlight November night in 1960, five people are there at the same time. Well, four technically, because one of them has just died from a gunshot wound! Three of the five are teenagers...

Ophaned at an early age, Susanna Warren was raised by her grandfather to love the mountains and respect the Native American customs. She is excited when she receives an assignment that would bring her home to her beloved Sierra Nevada Mountains to work as an archeologist and historian for the Native American Branch of the Smithsonian Institute. Her job is to search for areas the Washoe visited and document any rock art or artifacts in the area. But her first day on the mountain, she inadvertently steps into the path of thieves caught in the act of stealing rock art. A shotgun blast narrowly...

Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho.

A MAN SHOULD NOT DROWN IN A DESERT! BUT ONE HAS. TWICE! Teenage outsiders from the desert town of Smoke Tree find a body floating in a cistern beneath a desert moon, but an autopsy shows the man drowned elsewhere. Why move a drowned man and stage a false drowning? As Deputy Johnny Quentin, investigates, he discovers that the man's wife is also missing. Johnny must find her before the killer claims another victim. Find her in a section of open desert larger than some states. The new deputy, haunted his his tours as a Ranger in Vietnam and the death of his best friend there, must put his ...

THE LADY OF THE LAKE —-The mystery of Lake Ronkonkoma Legends such as The Loch Ness Monster, Atlantis, Big Foot, and the Bermuda Triangle, the Lady of the Lake on Long Island have mystified people for centuries. As the story goes, an Indian princess became romantically involved with an English woodcutter who toiled across the lake from the Indian camp. When her father, Chief of the Setauket Tribe, discovered her love affair with the English settler, he forbid her from seeing him again. Saddened with depression, the princess rowed to the deepest part of Lake Ronkonkoma and took her own ...

Sheriff Jim Weber always said it was just a matter of time before somebody shot Bureau of Indian Affairs Agent Gordon Hahn. The man was a loud, crude, misogynist drunk who treated women with disrespect, and was a racist who rode roughshod over the people of the White Mountain Apache Reservation. So Weber wasn't surprised when somebody finally did put an end to all of it with a bullet. He just didn't appreciate Hahn getting himself killed in the middle of Big Lake's annual Pioneers Days fireworks display. With more people who wanted the victim dead than alive, Weber and his deputies have ...

A lost and frightened horse plods down the National Mall, startling the crowd. When Gabriel Du Pré spots the confused animal, the connection is immediate, for neither of these creatures belongs in the sweltering heat of a DC summer. Du Pré, a Métis Indian from the wilds of Montana, calms the horse and leads it to the nearest policeman. Du Pré is in Washington to play his people’s music for a Smithsonian festival, but after leading the horse to safety, he encounters a murder instead.