Here are 4 books that The Joshua Croft Mysteries fans have personally recommended once you finish the The Joshua Croft Mysteries series.
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Deserts are inherently mysterious places. This likely explains why so many good mystery novels have been set in them. We spent better than forty years doing field work in the American Southwest, and we have found mystery novels based in this region among the very best. All good mystery novels must have strong plots and memorable characters, but to us an equally important component is setting. Jane is a botanist with expertise in the use of plant evidence in solving murder cases. Carl is a vertebrate zoologist and conservation biologist. Upon retirement we began writing mysteries. Some are set in the desert grasslands of Arizona, and all are inspired by the southwestern authors we have selected as our favorites.
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.
First book in the Posadas County Mystery Series When a series of crimes disrupts the tranquil community in Posadas County, New Mexico, a group of small-town cops will have to fight for their lives to keep the county safe Posadas County, New Mexico, has very few mean streets and no city-slick cop shop. But it has an earnest, elected County Sheriff and his aging Undersheriff-William C. Gastner. Pushing sixty, widower Bill has no other life than in law enforcement-and doesn't want one, even if he's being nudged gently toward retirement. Then big time trouble strikes. A car full of teens,…
Deserts are inherently mysterious places. This likely explains why so many good mystery novels have been set in them. We spent better than forty years doing field work in the American Southwest, and we have found mystery novels based in this region among the very best. All good mystery novels must have strong plots and memorable characters, but to us an equally important component is setting. Jane is a botanist with expertise in the use of plant evidence in solving murder cases. Carl is a vertebrate zoologist and conservation biologist. Upon retirement we began writing mysteries. Some are set in the desert grasslands of Arizona, and all are inspired by the southwestern authors we have selected as our favorites.
Joanna Brady finds herself elected sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, after her husband dies while campaigning for the same job. In this first book of the series, Sheriff Brady must clear her husband’s name of some ugly rumors while simultaneously searching for his killer. Joanna’s life is a complicated one, balancing motherhood and ranching on a small scale, while managing a sheriff’s department not used to having a woman at the helm. Add to the mix an unsympathetic mother-in-law and (later in the series) a new husband, and you have a protagonist constantly on the edge of chaos. We like this series especially for the author’s skill at portraying the way Brady manages her complicated life, while also evoking the environment and history in and around the former mining town of Bisbee.
Her obsessive hunt for a killer threatens to place both Joanna and her nine year old daughter Jenny in serious jeopardy. Because, in the desert, the truth can be more lethal than a rattlesnake's bite.
Deserts are inherently mysterious places. This likely explains why so many good mystery novels have been set in them. We spent better than forty years doing field work in the American Southwest, and we have found mystery novels based in this region among the very best. All good mystery novels must have strong plots and memorable characters, but to us an equally important component is setting. Jane is a botanist with expertise in the use of plant evidence in solving murder cases. Carl is a vertebrate zoologist and conservation biologist. Upon retirement we began writing mysteries. Some are set in the desert grasslands of Arizona, and all are inspired by the southwestern authors we have selected as our favorites.
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.
At loose ends, David Mapstone gets an assignment from a friend in the sheriff's office - go through the old "unsolved" files and clear them out one way or another. David doesn't expect to find any connection to the present or anything personal in any of these ancient cases. But when an old girlfriend turns up at his door asking him to help find her missing sister and the sister is later found murdered. David is atonished to see that her killing so closely parallels a 40-year-old case that it cannot be a coincidence.
Native American spirituality has fascinated me all my life. Watching the sweat lodge, hearing the drums and singing, smelling the wood smoke, burning sage, sweetgrass, and pine tar, I had to know more. I had to participate. When I was invited, I jumped at the chance. I've never had a “religious experience” in the church. The first time that flap shut on the lodge, and I found myself in the pitch dark, the water being poured and instantly vaporized into scalding steam, my skin on fire…that was a religious thing to be sure. When I began reading fictional murder/tribal mysteries, I knew what I wanted to write about. I let the sound of the drum guide me.
As a young police officer, I was looking for a book that incorporated things I loved: being a cop, Westerns, cowboys & Indians, and general dude stuff.
My dad recommended The Blessing Way, and I couldn’t put it down. Modern-day Native American Tribal Police investigating murders, I read them all!
I’ve been a fan of murder mysteries since I first read Edgar Allen Poe’s Murder at the Rue Morgue. Don’t get me started on Agatha Christie! Tony Hillerman was a true master of modern murder mysteries, creating memorable characters and plots.
Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+!
“Brilliant…as fascinating as it is original.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
From New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman, the first novel in his series featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn & Officer Jim Chee who encounter a bizarre case that borders between the supernatural and murder
Homicide is always an abomination, but there is something exceptionally disturbing about the victim discovered in a high, lonely place—a corpse with a mouth full of sand—abandoned at a crime scene seemingly devoid of tracks or useful clues.…
