17 Gripping Native American Mysteries and Thrillers to Add to Your TBR List

It’s been five years since Wren’s mother went missing. It seems like everyone has moved on, even Wren’s police officer father, who refuses to talk about the case.

But Wren hasn’t forgotten that her Cherokee mother has become one of hundreds of victims in the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Oklahoma. And she’s determined to find her. 

Find Her is middle grade, but it is as touching, powerful, and important a read for any adult as it is for middle schoolers.

Through the eyes of a young Cherokee girl, Ginger Reno explores identity, coming-of-age, and the fight for justice under the most challenging of circumstances. 

MacKenzie is haunted by dreams of the weekend leading up to her sister Sabrina’s death. But when aspects of her dreams start to bleed into reality, MacKenzie knows there’s something much darker at play than survivor’s guilt. 

She returns to Alberta to seek help from her family, finding them still grappling with the very grief MacKenzie had moved to Vancouver to escape.

Still, MacKenzie expected to find reprieve from her nightmares in their company. Instead, they only get worse. More real. More dangerous. 

What really happened the night of Sabrina’s death? To find out, MacKenzie may have to be a bad Cree and put her family in danger. But what if they already were?

When girls on Anna Horn’s reservation begin to go missing, her deep-rooted fears of an ancient tribal myth become harder to dismiss—fears of a disembodied entity that lurks in the shadows, waiting to devour her whole.

Her fears are only amplified when her sister Grace becomes one of the disappeared. 

As Anna and her tribe search for answers, old legends, and modern threats coalesce into one terrifying nightmare. To find her sister, Anna will have to be braver than she ever imagined possible in this mythological mystery thriller rooted in very real fears.

Twins Arcade and Daffodil Doggs share a special and unbreakable connection, right down to their shared heterochromia. They also share the weight of their bleak upbringing by relatives caught in a cycle of addiction on an Ohio reservation. 

Arcade has vowed to protect Daffodil through it all. But when a woman is discovered drowned in the river, and more follow suit in the coming weeks, Arcade more and more desperate to keep her promise—and terrifyingly less sure she can.  

Based on the true story of six women killed in Chillicothe, Ohio, poet and novelist Tiffany McDaniel has written a novel that is as every bit an elegy for these women as it is a propulsive thriller. 

Another supernatural thriller, And Then She Fell follows Alice, a young woman whose life is, on the surface, happy. She’s just given birth to a baby girl, Dawn. Her husband, Steve, is a white academic who studies her own Mohawk culture and supported her every step of her pregnancy. 

Yet as Alice settles into her new life in their posh Toronto neighborhood, she finds herself longing for her roots, reviving an old life goal of hers to write a modern retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story.

This life goal becomes a life line when the isolation Alice feels as the only Indigenous woman in her neighborhood starts to feel malicious. Passive aggressive neighbors are now aggressive. Alice finds herself losing bits of time and hearing unseen voices. And all the while, her husband tells her it’s all in her head.

As the the terrors Alice experience worsen, she becomes convinced that the only way she can put a stop to the forces against her and save her daughter is to write her creation story—before it’s too late. 

An all-encompassing debut that is an exquisite blend of crime thriller, supernatural horror, and coming-of-age story, Shutter follows forensic photographer Rita Todacheene, who is haunted by ghosts of crime victims who help her detect clues to obtain justice.

But these pestering phantoms are what drove her from her grandmother’s home on the Navajo reservation, where she grew up, and have gotten her into precarious situations with the law. 

Now she finds herself forced to avenge a spirit murdered on a highway overpass, leading her straight to the most threatening cartels in Albuquerque.

Intricately layered with gritty prose, this book will have you hooked from the first page.     

It’s been 15 years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, and the Echota family has not been coping well.

 Maria, the matriarch, has watched her family crumble over the years with her husband, Earnest, slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s, their daughter Sonja, who fixates on emotionally unavailable men, and their son Edgar, who tries to numb himself with drugs.

Yet, Maria hopes that the family’s annual bonfire will allow her loved ones to reconnect—after all, they will be coming together to celebrate the Cherokee National Holiday and reminisce about Ray-Ray. 

But as the event nears, the lines between reality and the spiritual world begin to intermingle. A foster child seems to be helping Earnest recount memories. Sonja meets a man who has ties to her past lives. Meanwhile, Edgar, after a suicide attempt, is experiencing the mystifying Darkening Land, where the living and dead meld.

Honoring Cherokee folklore, this novel tackles subjects surrounding grief, trauma, and family by weaving together a story that mixes the real with the otherworldly.     

Having won various book awards, including the Thriller Award for Best First Novel, Winter Counts is about a local enforcer's quest for revenge on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Virgil Wounded Horse is the man people call when the American legal system fails or the tribal council doesn’t deal out the preferred level of justice.

When Virgil’s nephew is affected by the burgeoning heroin epidemic, Virgil enlists his ex-girlfriend to help him figure out a way to track who is responsible for bringing drugs into this community. 

Meanwhile, drug cartels are expanding their influence and gaining formidable alliances, and the new tribal council initiative is raising unsettling questions concerning money and power.

Will Virgil be able to take down these dangerous cartels before they claim more innocent victims?    

Cash Blackbear just wants to be left alone. It’s the 1970s, and she wants to focus on finishing her monotonous first year at Moorhead State College and pass the time playing pool, smoking and learning judo.

Helping her guardian and friend, Sheriff Wheaton, try to find one of her missing classmates was never on her list of to-dos. But she feels like the dreams she’s been having of horrified girls desperately pleading for her help might have something to do with the case. 

And to make matters more stressful, her long-lost brother, who was separated from her when they were placed into foster care after being taken from the Ojibwe White Earth Reservation, has become her new houseguest.

Before time runs out, Cash must figure out if she can uncover the missing girl’s location and bring her safely home. 

Native American government official Stace Red Hawk must investigate the murders of the Graycloud family and Grace Blanket, who was the richest person in Oklahoma after discovering oil beneath Native American land.

A story filled with fraud, intimidation, and greed told through alternating perspectives with hints of magical realism makes for a riveting historical fiction read based on the true events of the Osage Tribe during the Oklahoma oil boom.

It explores how far humans are willing to go to fulfill their insatiable materialism and need for power. 

One security guard is dead and another has been wounded at the Children’s Museum of Science and History in Oklahoma.

Detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Chris Pierson are called to investigate but determine no signs of the typical evidence that is usually left after a crime—no fingerprints, no footprints, and no signs of forced entry. 

However, they do notice that a piece of a skeleton has been stolen, which is the remains of Hatak Haksi, a witch and mother of the Crow family.

This shape-shifting family yearns to regain the prestige and power they once possessed. And they have a plan—retreat to Chalahwa Ranch and use the protection of the Old Ones, guardians of the Choctaw afterlife.

By reimagining old tribal beliefs with a modern spin, author Devon Mihesuah creates a captivating supernatural mystery for readers to enjoy.  

An Ojibwa woman's sudden death just outside the Minnesota Red Earth Reservation is ruled a suicide, but Renee LaRoche suspects otherwise—especially after the woman's former lover comes back into town.

In the process of her search she uncovers the terrible practices of the foster care system, forcing her to face the traumas of her own childhood and reckon with upsetting truths.

The day the Kiowa Nation gathered at Rainy Mountain to witness Cheyenne Robber—a man charged with the murder of a fellow tribesman—was a day Tay-bodal would not soon forget.

This terrible event threatened the unity of the Kiowa Nation, but Tay-bodal (who always felt on the outside of his clan) has the opportunity to reunite his people by using his unconventional ways to learn the truth behind the murder.

More than just learning the truth, Tay-bodal's journey proves to be compelling, spiritual—and life-changing.

Set just after the violent race riot of 1921, Anadarko follows J.D. Daugherty—Irish former cop turned private investigator—and Hoolie Smith—Cherokee war veteran—as they investigate the strange disappearance of oilman and geologist Frank Shotz.

What appears to be a simple missing persons case turns out to be ... not so simple, after all. The two soon find themselves caught in a web of murder, corruption, bigotry, and injustice—when the disappearance is linked with a group of bootleggers connected to the Ku Klux Klan.

This gritty mystery grapples with racial prejudice through the lens of a tense and suspenseful tale.

This riveting mystery follows Renee "Cash" Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman, as she grapples with discomforting implications in the wake of a Native American stranger's cold-hearted murder.

This murder illuminates the harsh realities of the foster care system and brings the oppression of Native Americans into harsh light for Renee.

Set in the 1970s in Red River Valley, finding the men who killed this stranger will be a long, dangerous road.

Born on the same day as Edgar Allen Poe and Dolly Parton, Eden Robinson is convinced this unlikely combo is evident in her writing style.

Tough, gritty, and addictive, Blood Sports follows cousins Tom and Jeremy, as well as Paulie—a junkie with two years clean. When everyone learns Tom has been talking to the police, men from the past with a lot on the line suddenly reappear and these three men find themselves as pawns in a game—with their whole lives at stake.

With tension at an all time high from the first page to the last, this one is impossible to put down.

Sadie Walela is a blue-eyed Cherokee who has learned how to adapt to survive in the white man's world.

But when her co-worker at Mercury Savings Bank is killed in a whirlwind robbery, Sadie finds herself a suspect. As this banker-turned-detective is about to find out—no one is as they seem.

At this point, the only thing she can count on is deception, and she'll have to sort through all the lies to clear her name.