Here are 100 books that Hearts of the Missing fans have personally recommended if you like
Hearts of the Missing.
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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.
I was ashamed to be a white man after reading this account of Native American thoughts and feelings on watching their land, their way of life, slip away.
Just the account of what happened at Wounded Knee, where unarmed Native American men, women, and children were gunned down in the snow, left me sick to my stomach.
This is a non-fiction book that I read on my spiritual journey. I researched several of the accounts in this book because I couldn’t believe they were true. They were.
The American West, 1860-1890: years of broken promises, disillusionment, war and massacre.
Beginning with the Long Walk of the Navajos and ending with the massacre of Sioux at Wounded Knee, this extraordinary book tells how the American Indians lost their land, lives and liberty to white settlers pushing westward. Woven into a an engrossing saga of cruelty, treachery and violence are the fascinating stories of such legendary figures as Sitting Bull, Cochise, Crazy Horse and Geronimo.
First published in 1970, Dee Brown's brutal and compelling narrative changed the way people thought about the original inhabitants of America, and focused attention…
Winner Literary Titan Gold Book Award-Case and Trish Teal PI seek justice—fast-paced action and surprises everywhere. Takes place in Houston, Vegas, and rural Texas. He hunts the murders and unrelated tangles with the mob.
There is a book in a book on killing bad guys. Loved it! Top-Notch Thriller! Thought-provoking!…
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.…
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.
I waited years for new tribal mysteries by him, and then he was gone. I searched and searched, and then Craig Johnson came out with his Longmire books (which he is still writing!), and I couldn’t be happier! More tribal murder mysteries, only this time, the main character is a white County Sheriff who has a Native American best friend.
This first book hooked me in a new way, from a different perspective. I read them all and watched the TV series as well. I think it was Hillerman and Johnson that were the catalyst for my own tribal murder mystery books….
Introducing Wyoming's Sheriff Walt Longmire in this riveting novel from the New York Times bestselling author, the first in the Longmire mystery series
Craig Johnson's new novel, LAND OF WOLVES, is forthcoming from Viking
Fans of Ace Atkins, Nevada Barr and Robert B. Parker will love this outstanding first novel, in which New York Times bestselling author Craig Johnson introduces Sheriff Walt Longmire of Wyoming's Absaroka County. Johnson draws on his deep attachment to the American West to produce a literary mystery of stunning authenticity, and full of memorable characters. After twenty-five years as sheriff of Absaroka County, Walt Longmire's…
Winner Literary Titan Gold Book Award-Case and Trish Teal PI seek justice—fast-paced action and surprises everywhere. Takes place in Houston, Vegas, and rural Texas. He hunts the murders and unrelated tangles with the mob.
There is a book in a book on killing bad guys. Loved it! Top-Notch Thriller! Thought-provoking!…
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.
Another strong series is the Joe Pickett books by C.J. Box.
I think you can tell I like to read in series and by author. There are 26 books in this series! I hope to write as many… This is mystery and murder at times, and although not in, on, or around American Indian lands, these books have almost the same feel, starting with this one.
Rather than a cop, he’s a game warden. Almost the same thing, but dealing with laws around fish & game. Now, Joe has some issues that I liked. Not his emotional drama, but the showing of them. It made him more human. Who doesn’t have issues? I know I do.
Winner of 2009's highly coveted Edgar Award for Best Novel Winner of the Anthony Award for Best First Novel Winner of the Gumshoe Award for Best First Novel Winner of the Barry Award for Best First Novel Winner of the Macavity Award for Best First Novel
There's nothing unusual about the sound of a gunshot in Twelve Sleep. Here in remotest Wyoming, where elk roam the pine forests and cougars prowl the mountains, everyone owns a gun. But when Joe Pickett hears two sharp cracks ring out months before hunting season, it's his job to investigate.
I remember the first time I stepped onto a sailing ship and that was the full-size replica of the Cutty Sark at Greenwich, London. The younger me descended below decks and started to imagine the enormity of risking everything on an expedition into the unknown. Since that time, I’ve become an eighteenth-century scholar, able to channel my wonder at the age of sail into researching, teaching, writing, and broadcasting about many aspects of the period. I hope the books on this list help you journey all over the globe with a sense of what it was like to trust your life to a self-contained floating world heading into unchartered waters.
Philbrick had me from his opening sentence: “We all want to know how it was in the beginning.” He makes a familiar history fresh, asking how fifty years of peace at Plymouth Rock between the Mayflower Pilgrims and local Wampanoags could end in war.
Within this overarching theme, it’s the small details I remember, such as how Philbrick interviewed Captain Alan Villiers who sailed a 1957 replica of the Mayflower. In a violent transatlantic storm, Villiers tested a Jacobean sailing technique that hadn’t been tried for centuries, furling the sails and securing the helm into the wind. Its boxy shape kept Mayflower II perfectly balanced, bobbing upright in the gale. With accounts like this, I felt Philbrick had done his research and gave real credibility to his description of the voyage and its aftermath.
Nathaniel Philbrick, bestselling author of 'In the Heart of the Sea', reveals the darker side of the Pilgrim fathers' settlement in the New World, which ultimately erupted in bloody battle some fifty years after they first landed on American soil.
Behind the quaint and pious version of the Mayflower story usually taught in American primary schools is a tumultuous and largely untold tale of violence, subterfuge and epic drama.
For amidst the friendships and co-operation that sprang up between the settlers and indigenous people, whose timely assistance on more than one occasion rescued the Pilgrims from otherwise certain death, a…
Of the five books I recommended, four are memoirs, and one is a novel that reads like a memoir. I read these books because the subject, the maternal relationship, fascinates me, and also because I wanted to learn from these other writers. Each book gave me some ideas about how to approach my own exploration of my relationship with my mother. At the same time, the books reinforced my belief that each of us carries our family history forward, especially our maternal history. To live fully requires understanding and integrating that past.
I loved this gorgeous memoir, in part for its compelling structure—a blend of prose and poetry.
The narrator explores his grief in the aftermath of his mother's death, and in doing so, reminded me of the ways in which grief never leaves you, though it changes over time. Alexie seeks to, and succeeds in, animating his mother as the complex and deeply traumatized woman she was. Studying how he portrayed his mother gave me some new ways to think about how I might present my own.
This writer placed his very personal story of grief within the context of larger losses he experienced as a Native American man—familial, cultural, environmental. At the same time, Alexie's memoir is an ode to human resiliency. It is a memorable book.
A searing, deeply moving memoir about family, love, loss, and forgiveness from the critically acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
Family relationships are never simple. But Sherman Alexie's bond with his mother Lillian was more complex than most. She plunged her family into chaos with a drinking habit, but shed her addiction when it was on the brink of costing her everything. She survived a violent past, but created an elaborate facade to hide the truth. She selflessly cared for strangers, but was often incapable of showering her children with the…
I am a Northern Irish crime writer. I worship storytellers, no matter if the stories are relayed on the page, the screen, or in songs. As long as the stories come across as real, then I am happy.
I, as a storyteller, endeavor to be more of a "camera" than a “writer.” I believe it’s all there waiting for me, and as a “camera,” I am allowed to go deep into myself and record all that my imagination is producing. I believe all the books I have selected have helped me in some small way understand why some of us can commit crimes while others can’t.
Colin Dexter immediately pulls me into what reads as a real world.
The writing is so beautiful, I’m not aware of anything but the story. The chapters are delightfully short and tight, so much so that the pages absolutely flow past.
I prefer reading books that, even though they are clearly fiction, read as true crime stories. When I read a Colin Dexter Morse mystery, I am unaware of pages, chapters, sentences, punctuation. I am allowed to be totally immersed in the story. The casts of perfectly drawn characters in each story always intrigue me.
Morse is flawed, a quality he shares with the camera. He doesn’t mind being wrong, a rare quality in a human.
Last Bus to Woodstock is the novel that began Colin Dexter's phenomenally successful Inspector Morse series.
'Do you think I'm wasting your time, Lewis?' Lewis was nobody's fool and was a man of some honesty and integrity. 'Yes, sir.' An engaging smile crept across Morse's mouth. He thought they could get on well together . . .
The death of Sylvia Kaye figured dramatically in Thursday afternoon's edition of the Oxford Mail. By Friday evening Inspector Morse had informed the nation that the police were looking for a dangerous man - facing charges of wilful murder, sexual assault and rape.…
I’ve always been drawn to complex female characters in both reading and writing. Even in the 21st century, there are so many expectations placed on girls and women to conform to society’s narrow concepts of femininity. As a queer woman who grew up under the UK’s Section 28, I’ve always struggled to fit myself into these pre-assigned boxes, which is why I’m fascinated by those who step so firmly out of them. I teach as well as write and one of the most satisfying things about both is the time I get to spend examining character. I hope you’re as captivated by these difficult women as I am!
I read this gripping psychological noir about a woman escaping her past and falling into a steamy, lethal affair a few years ago, but it’s still vividly seared into my mind.
I found the writing utterly captivating, and I think Lippman is an absolute genius when it comes to plot. This twisty story of love, lies, betrayal, and revenge kept me guessing right until the very end–not to mention reading through the middle of the night!
WINNER OF THE eDUNNIT AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL NOMINATED FOR THE CWA GOLD DAGGER
'Dark, gleaming. Read it.' GILLIAN FYNN 'Note perfect . . . Not to be missed.' MEGAN ABBOTT
Over the course of a punishing summer, Polly and Adam abandon themselves to a steamy, inexorable affair. Still, each holds something back from the other - dangerous, even lethal secrets.
Then someone dies. Was it an accident or part of a plan? By now Adam and Polly are so ensnared in each other's lives and lies that neither one knows how to get away - or even if…
I’m a keen follower of Scottish crime fiction, a genre that has really come to the fore in recent years, spawning dedicated book festivals and many TV and film adaptations. The great thing about many of these books is that they don’t always follow the usual narrative of cops and baddies but have varied and diverse storylines, often concentrating on characters in unusual or extreme situations and not involving the police–something I attempted in my own book. My picks on this list hopefully illustrate just how diverse Scottish crime writing can be and encourage more readers to seek it out.
Crime novels can often take themselves too seriously, but a fair proportion of Scottish crime writing tends to buck this trend.
Douglas Skelton has several novels that, while dealing with unsavory, violent characters and deadly situations, make us laugh with the sheer joy of witty dialogue and the blackest of black humor.
This book is one of these (even the title makes me smile!). The fast pace, quick-fire jokes, and knowing references to film noir of the 40s and 50s make this a compulsive, entertaining page-turner.
A missing teenage girl should be an easy job for Dominic Queste - after all, finding lost souls is what he does best. But wouldn't it be better sometimes if lost souls just stayed that way? Jenny Deavers is trouble. She's being hunted, and for the people tracking her, murder is nothing. As the bodies pile up, so does the pressure on Queste, both to protect Jenny and to find out who wants her dead. The trail leads him to a brutal world of gangsters, merciless hitmen, dark family secrets and an insatiable lust for power in the highest echelons…
Having spent my entire professional life in the art world as a practicing artist, art historian, journalist, curator, and museum director, and as an avid reader of mysteries, I’m excited when I find fiction in which art and crime coincide. Authentic settings, strong characters, and plenty of deception are de rigeur. The occasional dead body is always a plus, though not strictly required. It’s a specialized genre, but it speaks to me and inspires me to write my own series of art-world mysteries, combining fictional characters with real people from my own background and experience.
No fake this time. Instead, a likely real but unknown Cézanne portrait sends Antoine Verlaque, chief magistrate of the artist’s hometown, Aix-en-Provence, to identify the sitter, authenticate the painting, and find out who killed to get hold of it.
I love how the story shifts back and forth between the present, as Verlaque and his partner track down the thief and murderer, and 1885 when Cézanne meets the woman in the portrait. Longworth beautifully evokes the town’s atmosphere—I could almost smell the delicious aroma wafting from the pastry shop that provides the vital clue.
A beguiling mystery that finds Verlaque and Bonnet searching for a murderer—in a crime tied to Provence’s greatest artist
Provençal Mystery Series #5 Watch the series! Murder in Provence is now on Britbox.
A friend in his cigar club asks Antoine Verlaque to visit René Rouquet, a retired postal worker who has found a rolled-up canvas in his apartment. As the apartment once belonged to Paul Cézanne, Rouquet is convinced he’s discovered a treasure. But when Antoine arrives at the apartment, he finds René dead, the canvas missing, and a mysterious art history professor standing over the body.
