4 books like Joanna Brady Mysteries

On the surface at least, Santa Fe is an artsy place full of elegant and sophisticated people. Private investigator Joshua Croft is none of these things, but he does know his way around town. His partner Rita Mondragon is older and wiser and better connected than Joshua. She’s also rather mysterious. Together they solve cases that either have baffled the local police or were of no particular interest to them. In Wall of Glass, the first in the series, a jewelry theft followed quickly by two seemingly unrelated murders draw the pair into the dark world of contraband art and artifacts. We particularly like this series for the complex and nuanced relationship between the two protagonists, and for the ways in which the author captures both the physical and cultural environment of one of America’s oldest cities. 

Bill Gastner is the sort of detective you’d expect to find working the mean streets of an inner city: a rumpled overweight insomniac addicted to coffee and cigarettes. Instead his beat is the Chihuahan Desert of a fictitious county on the border between New and Old Mexico. In Heartshot, Undersheriff Gastner must solve multiple murders related to the illegal drug trade, including the loss of a fellow officer. The killer turns out to be somebody nearly as surprising and dangerous as the place where Gastner finds him. In his first book in the Posadas County series, author Havill skillfully brings to life both the rewards and challenges of life in a harsh yet beautiful place, where the people of two cultures are trying to figure out ways to live with one another.

David Mapstone is a failed PhD academic who comes home to Phoenix, Arizona, where an old friend with the sheriff’s department takes pity and finds him a job solving cold cases. It turns out he’s good at it, but he is less successful in coping with the urban sprawl that has nearly obliterated the best parts of his hometown. In Concrete Desert, the first in Talton’s series, Mapstone reconnects with an old flame when she asks him to solve the mystery of her missing sister. While doing so, he stumbles on an eerie connection with an unsolved mystery from forty years earlier. We especially liked this book and the whole series because of the author’s skillful depiction of the old and the new, and the best and the worst, of a city in the process of gobbling up an American desert. 

I would suggest anything by Hillerman, but you might as well start with the first in the series. Without overtly advocating for activism to protect nature, Hillerman renders the desert southwest in such achingly beautiful detail that one can’t help but want to fight to protect it. In fact, Hillerman is where I got my start in reading/writing environmental thrillers.