7 Gripping Mystery Books Set in the Southwest United States

The first in Havill’s beloved Posadas County mysteries, featuring veteran local sheriff William C. Gastne,r was published back in 1991.

Set in rural New Mexico on the edge of the San Cristobal Mountains, Heartshot sees the shrewd but lumbering Gastner investigating the death of a group of local teenagers whose car has plunged into a ravine.

The tragedy takes an unexpected twist with the discovery of a kilo of cocaine under one of the seats. Widowed, old, and aching, Gastner finds himself dealing with grieving parents while simultaneously tackling an explosion of violence in his once peaceful small town community.

An engaging start to a series that now numbers 27 books.

Wise-cracking Santa Fe PI Joshua Croft makes his debut in this 1988 mystery that sees our hero attempting to broker a deal to recover a stolen diamond.

When his client, a small-time operator, winds up dead, the world-weary Croft realises he’s tangled up in something way darker and deeper than simple theft—a chasm of trouble. His attempt to unravel the mystery leads him into the upper echelons of Santa Fe society, where the stylish surroundings can’t disguise the murderous intent of some of the inhabitants.

Like any good PI, Croft gets banged over the head, betrayed, and shot at, but never loses his ability to come back with a sharp and cynical one-liner. 

Crime writer Don Pendleton made his home in Arizona and made his living from penning the incredibly successful (and violent) Mack Bolan the Executioner books.

Former U.S. Army sergeant and Vietnam veteran Bolan makes Jack Reacher look like a sandal-wearing, tofu-eating pacifist as he wages bloody war on the mafia wherever he roots them out In this, the 35^th book in the series, Bolan is on his way to Arizona and what he hopes will be a peaceful retirement. 

That new and quiet life gets put on hold when the Executioner gets wind of a mob-funded physician performing sadistic experiments on disloyal capos in New Mexico. Soon, the desert sand is redder than a Silver City sunset as Bolan wreaks savage vengeance on everyone responsible.

Orenduff’s amiable and funny series featuring Hubie Schuze gets off to a cracking start with this 2009 mystery. Antique dealer Schuze has made a reputation for himself combing the deserts of New Mexico, unearthing valuable ceramic objects.

He thinks of himself as a treasure hunter, the authorities are not so convinced. While Hubie’s work is definitely on the borderline of wrongdoing, when he’s offered $25,000 to steal a valuable vase from a museum, he seems about to jump firmly into the world of out-and-out criminality.

Once he’s surveyed the security, however, the good-natured Hubie decides not to go through with the burglary after all. But when the pot is stolen a few weeks later, suspicion inevitably falls on the man museum staff have seen casing the joint earlier in the month.

There’s only one way for our hero to shake the cops off his trail—find the real thief.

Tony Hillerman’s knowledge of Native American lifeways, elegant style, and deep empathy with his characters and the harsh desert landscape of the Southwest garnered him a considerable reputation, one that has swelled with the success of the Dark Winds TV series.

The Thief of Time is the eighth of the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police detective series and arguably the finest. Hillermen effortlessly weaves together Anasazi ruins, a missing anthropologist, a stolen backho,e and a double homicide to create a gripping mystery novel.

The action is movingly underscored by Leaphorn’s heart-rending struggle to come to terms with the death of his beloved wife, Emma. 

The sixth mystery in Lance’s fine series featuring recently widowed parent, Joanna Brady, the doughty sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona.

The murder of a local gun dealer with links to a group of armed separatists sets things rolling in this exciting yarn that sees the indomitable Brady struggling to combine the demands of single motherhood with those of keeping her small town community safe from a band of ruthless and heavily armed men.

The local landscape is as vividly rendered as the action, and Brady is the sort of relatable, big-hearted character every reader can root for. 

Barber’s tough, non-nonsense protagonist Detective Sergeant Gilbert Montoya, makes his second appearance in the tautly plotted mystery from 2010. Montoya is attending the annual fiesta in Santa Fe that culminates with the burning of a forty-foot-tall figure of Zozobra.

Unfortunately, on this occasio,n the effigy turns out to contain real human remains. Soon, more packages of bones are turning up around the city.

Montoya enlists the help of local newshound Lucy Newroe in an attempt to find the criminal before things can take an even darker turn. The Bone Fire was a deserved winner of the first Tony Hillerman Prize.