Native American Fiction Mystery

Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai’po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear—and even follow you home. These shiver-inducing tales introduce listeners to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge.

The ritual killing of a young Apache girl on a reservation in rural Arizona takes the listener through many complex layers of relationships between Apache and Anglo cultures. The myth and spiritual fabric of the Apache community pulls Zeb Hanks, a small town sheriff, through a personal journey, making the murder not just a crime to solve but a cathartic passage. The dead never leave us but they do whisper ghost stories that bring the past back to life. Jake Dablo is a drunken, washed up lawman because of his inability to solve the murder of his only granddaughter.

Craig Johnson has won multiple awards and earned starred reviews from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews for his New York Times best-selling Walt Longmire mysteries. Embarking on his eighth adventure in As the Crow Flies, Sheriff Longmire is searching the Cheyenne Reservation for a site to host his daughter’s wedding, when he sees a woman fall to her death. Teaming up with beautiful tribal chief Lolo Long, Walt sets out to investigate the suspicious death.

Introducing Wyoming's Sheriff Walt Longmire in this riveting novel from the New York Times best-selling author of Dry Bones, the first in the Longmire series, the basis for the hit Netflix original series Longmire. Johnson draws on his deep attachment to the American West to produce a literary mystery of stunning authenticity, full of memorable characters.

Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire mysteries are critically acclaimed. Longmire's third outing takes him from Wyoming to Philadelphia to investigate a brutal assault on his daughter, Cady. Walt believes her ex-boyfriend is behind the crime and searches him out. But when he turns up dead, Walt is back to square one.

When an elderly local woman is found poisoned, Sheriff Walt Longmire begins an investigation that soon has him ensnared in a deadly spider's web. From Craig Johnson, author of the acclaimed novel The Cold Dish, comes this enthralling Sheriff Longmire mystery. With a distinctive literary flair, Johnson leads us into the wide open space of Absaroka County, Wyoming.

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.

When Jen, the largest, most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found, surfaces in Sherriff Walt Longmire's jurisdiction, it appears to be a windfall for the High Plains Dinosaur Museum - until Danny Lone Elk, the Cheyenne rancher on whose property the remains were discovered, turns up dead, floating face down in a turtle pond. With millions of dollars at stake, a number of groups step forward to claim her, including Danny's family, the tribe, and the federal government.

Spur Award-winner Craig Johnson has garnered critical acclaim for his Walt Longmire mysteries. In this riveting seventh entry, Wyoming’s Absaroka County sheriff, Walt Longmire, is pushed beyond his limits. When three hardened convicts escape FBI custody in a mountain blizzard, an armed psychopath leads them up Big Horn Mountain. As Longmire struggles to track their treacherous ascent, he’ll need all the help he can get from the tribal spirits of the towering summit.

In this ninth installment in the award-winning and New York Times best-selling Walt Longmire mystery series, the Wyoming sheriff follows his cowboy code of ethics in a religious range war that strikes a little too close to home.

One of the most viewed paintings in American history, Custer's Last Fight, copied and distributed by Anheuser-Busch at a rate of more than two million copies a year, was destroyed in a fire at the 7th Cavalry Headquarters in Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1946. Or was it? When Charley Lee Stillwater dies of an apparent heart attack at the Wyoming Home for Soldiers & Sailors, Walt Longmire is called in to try and make sense of a piece of a painting and a Florsheim shoebox containing a million dollars, sending the good sheriff on the trail of a dangerous art heist.

Attempting to recover from his harrowing experiences in Mexico, in Land of Wolves Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire is neck deep in the investigation of what could or could not be the suicidal hanging of a shepherd. With unsettling connections to a Basque family with a reputation for removing the legs of Absaroka County sheriffs, matters become even more complicated with the appearance of an oversize wolf in the Big Horn Mountains to which Walt finds himself feeling more and more empathetic.

Reservation "bad boy" Thomas Begay is found dead drunk under the La Plata Bridge, which is not unusual for him. What is unusual, however, is that beautiful BIA investigator Patsy Greyhorse is found lying beside him, not drunk or even a Navajo but very dead nonetheless. Charlie Yazzie, fresh from law school, risks his career and even his life to help his old friend. The answer seems to lie with the Yeenaaldiooshii...should one choose to believe in such things.

A Marine returns home after suffering wounds from an RPG blast that killed many of his squad members, including his best friend. He now faces brutal battles at home. Sully’s parents are estranged, his father is an invalid, and the family ranch is nearing bankruptcy. Murdering thieves are stealing champion horses and disappearing into the desert like ghosts. While attempting to make peace with his abusive father, Sully discovers the shocking secrets that drove his parents apart. Deeply resentful, he works with his father solely for the survival of the ranch. Sully finds comfort in Maggie, ...

Cash and Sheriff Wheaton make for a strange partnership. He pulled her from her mother's wrecked car when she was three. He's kept an eye out for her ever since. It's a tough place to live - northern Minnesota along the Red River. Cash navigated through foster homes, and at 13 was working farms. She's tough as nails, five feet two inches, blue jeans, blue jean jacket, smokes Marlboros, drinks Bud Longnecks. Makes her living driving truck. Playing pool on the side.

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.

If there's one thing that Bureau of Indian Affairs Investigator Emmett Quanah Parker knows, it's that the dead don't always stay dead. When the corpse of a woman, brutally murdered and bizarrely mutilated, is discovered on Havasupai Nation land, Parker is paired with FBI Special Agent Anna Turnipseed in a hastily assembled task force of two. The two share a mixed Native American ancestry - and little else.

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."

The car fire didn’t kill Navajo Tribal Policeman Delbert Nez—a bullet did. And the old man in possession of the murder weapon is a whiskey-soaked shaman named Ashie Pinto. Officer Jim Chee is devastated by the slaying of his good friend Del and confounded by the prime suspect’s refusal to utter a single word of confession or denial. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn believes there is much more to this outrage than what appears on the surface as he and Jim Chee set out to unravel a complex weave of greed and death that involves a historical find and a lost fortune.

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.