Beyond the Bestsellers November 2025 |
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The Bone Thief (Syd Walker #2)
by Vanessa Lillie
When a Native teenager vanishes from her small town—a place with dark ties to an elite historical society—archaeologist Syd Walker is called to investigate.
In the hours before dawn at a local summer camp, Bureau of Indian Affairs archaeologist Syd Walker receives an alarming call: newly discovered skeletal remains have been stolen. Not only have bones gone missing, but a Native teen girl has disappeared near the camp, and law enforcement dismisses her family's fears. As Syd investigates both crimes, she's drawn into a world of privileged campers and their wealthy parents—most of them members of the Founders Society, an exclusive club whose members trace their lineage to the first colonists and claim ancestral rights to the land. The deeper Syd digs, the more she realizes there is a pattern of disappearances stretches back generations, all leading to the Founders Society's doorstep. But exposing the truth means confronting not just the town's most powerful families, but also a legacy of violence that refuses to stay buried.
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Love Is a War Song
by Danica Nava
A Muscogee pop star and a cowboy who couldn’t be more different come together to strike a deal.
Pop singer Avery Fox has become a national joke after posing scantily clad on the cover of Rolling Stone in a feather warbonnet. What was meant to be a statement of her success as a Native American singer has turned her into a social pariah. With threats coming from every direction, she escapes to her estranged grandmother Lottie’s ranch in Oklahoma.
Red Fox Ranch has been home to Lucas Iron Eyes since he was sixteen years old. He has lived by three rules to keep himself out of trouble: 1) preserve the culture, 2) respect the horses, and 3) stick to himself. When he is tasked with picking up Lottie’s granddaughter at the bus station, the last person he expected to see is the Avery Fox. Lucas can’t stand what she represents, but when he’s forced to work with her on the ranch, he can’t get her out of his sight—or his head.
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The Devil Is a Southpaw
by Brandon Hobson
A haunting, unforgettable exploring the friendship and rivalry between two gifted boys in harrowing circumstances.
Milton Muleborn has envied Matthew Echota, a talented young Cherokee artist, ever since they were locked up together in a dangerous juvenile detention center in the late 1980s. Until Matthew escaped, that is. A novel within a novel, we read here Milton’s account of the story of their childhood even as, years later, he remains jealous of Matthew’s extraordinary abilities and unlikely success. Milton reveals secrets about their friendship, their families, and their nightmarish, sometimes surreal, experience of imprisonment. In revisiting the past, he explores the echoing traumas of racial and institutional violence and the systemic injustices in our systems of incarceration and so-called reform.
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Hole in the Sky
by Daniel H. Wilson
A gripping sci-fi thriller—and Native American First Contact story.
Heliopause is a real place—the very outer edge of our solar system where the sun's solar winds are no longer strong enough to keep debris and intrusions from bombarding our system. It is the farthest edge of our protected boundary and the line beyond which space experts look for extraterrestrial presences. Weaving together the story of Jim, a down-on-his-luck absentee father in the Osage territory of Oklahoma, and his daughter, Tawny, with those of a NASA engineer and a CIA investigator, Hole in the Sky explores a Native American first contact that pulls all five characters into something never before seen or imagined.
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If the Dead Belong Here
by Carson Faust
When a young girl goes missing, the ghosts of the past collide with her family’s secrets in a mesmerizing Native American Southern Gothic tale.
When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her family is left shattered, struggling to navigate the darkness of grief and unanswered questions. As their search turns to despair, Laurel’s older sister, Nadine, begins experiencing nightmares that blur the line between dream and reality. She becomes convinced that Laurel’s disappearance could be connected to other family tragedies. Guided by her elders, Nadine sets out to uncover whether laying the ghosts to rest is the key to finding her sister and healing her fractured family.
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Legendary Frybread Drive-In: Intertribal Stories
by Cynthia Leitich Smith
Featuring the voices of both new and acclaimed Indigenous writers and edited by bestselling Muscogee author Cynthia Leitich Smith, this collection of interconnected stories serves up laughter, love, Native pride, and the world’s best frybread.
The road to Sandy June's Legendary Frybread Drive-In slips through every rez and alongside every urban Native hangout. The menu offers a rotating feast, including traditional eats and tasty snacks. But Sandy June's serves up more than it hosts live music, movie nights, unexpected family reunions, love long lost, and love found again. Featuring stories and poems by: Kaua Mahoe Adams, Marcella Bell, Angeline Boulley, K. A. Cobell, A. J. Eversole, Jen Ferguson, Eric Gansworth, Byron Graves, Kate Hart, Christine Hartman Derr, Karina Iceberg, Cheryl Isaacs, Darcie Little Badger, David A. Robertson, Andrea L. Rogers, Cynthia Leitich Smith, and Brian Young.
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The Sleep Room: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him
by Jon Stock
The shocking account of the women tortured by a legendary psychiatrist in his infamous “sleep room,” and the survivors fighting for change in the system.
Dr. William Sargant ran a lucrative private practice and published multiple books on psychiatry. He was awarded the Starkey medal and prize by the Royal Society of Health for his work on psychiatric medicine. But what he was best known for was his Sleep Room in Ward 5. This was a dark gallery where patients selected by Sargant were, often without their consent or that of their families, subjected to deep narcosis, sleeping for more than 21 hours per day for weeks at a time, and roused only for sessions of electroconvulsive therapy. When his patients finished their treatment, they had lost not only memories of trauma, but also any sense of who they were or why they were there. Building on the testimony of eight survivors, Stock looks at the shadowy interface between medicine, the intelligence community, and dangerous charlatans.
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She Kills: The Murderous Socialite, the Cross-Dressing Bank Robber, and Other True Crime Tales
by Skip Hollandsworth
A superb collection of true-crime stories—written by Texas Monthly's legendary feature writer, Skip Hollandsworth.
Skip Hollandsworth has been covering true crime since long before the podcasts, networks, and television shows discovered it. Texas born and bred, the revered journalist joined Texas Monthly in 1989, and the stories he has written over three-plus decades have helped define a locale and a culture. Hollandsworth brings together the favorite stories he has written for the magazine, from the tale of the high schooler who had “no choice” but to poison Dad’s refried beans, to the suburban dentist who killed her loving husband by driving over him three times. She Kills is jaw-dropping, addictively readable compendium of the evil that women do. And why.
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Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, an Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History
by Adam Cohen
Four men in a lifeboat. Two weeks without food. One impossible choice that would reshape the boundaries between survival and murder.
On May 19, 1884, the yacht Mignonette set sail from England on what should have been an uneventful voyage. When their vessel sank in the Atlantic, Captain Thomas Dudley and his crew found themselves adrift in a tiny lifeboat. As days turned to weeks, they faced an unthinkable starve to death or resort to cannibalism. Their decision to sacrifice the youngest–17-year-old cabin boy Richard Parker–ignited a firestorm of controversy upon their rescue. Instead of being hailed as heroes and survivors, Dudley and his crew found themselves at the center of a landmark murder trial that would transform law and ethics forever. Through this Victorian tragedy, Cohen reveals an enduring conflict between humanity's most primal instincts and its highest moral principles, forcing readers to ask how far would they go to stay alive?
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The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
by Siddharth Kara
A notorious slave ship incident that led to the abolition of slavery in the UK and sparked the US abolitionist movement.
In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts. After reaching Africa, the Zorg was captured by a privateer and came under British command. With a new captain and crew, the ship was crammed with 442 slaves and departed in 1781 for Jamaica. But a series of unpredictable weather events and mistakes in navigation left the ship drastically off course and running out of water. So a proposition was put forth: Save the crew and the most valuable of the slaves—by throwing dozens of people, starting with women and children, overboard. What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history.
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The Jailhouse Lawyer
by Calvin Duncan
A searing and ultimately hopeful account of Calvin Duncan’s thirty-year path through Angola after a wrongful murder conviction, his coming-of-age as a legal mind while imprisoned, and his continued advocacy for those on the inside.
Calvin Duncan was nineteen when he was incarcerated for a 1981 New Orleans murder he didn’t commit. The victim of a wildly incompetent public defense system and a badly compromised witness, Duncan was left to rot in the waking nightmare of confinement. Armed with little education, he took matters into his own hands. During his decades of incarceration, Calvin helped hundreds of other prisoners navigate their cases, advocating for those the state had long since written off. Prison reform advocate Sophie Cull met Duncan after he was finally released from prison; Calvin began to tell her his story. Together, they've written a bracing condemnation of the criminal justice system, and an intimate portrait of a heroic and brilliant man’s resilience in the face of injustice.
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The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces
by Seth Harp
A groundbreaking investigation into a string of unsolved murders at America’s largest military base.
Two dead bodies were discovered in a forested area of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2020. One, William “Billy” Lavigne, was a member of Delta Force, the most secretive “black ops” unit in the military. A long-serving veteran of America’s classified assassination program, Lavigne had done more than a dozen deployments, was addicted to crack cocaine, and had committed a series of violent crimes before he was mysteriously killed. The other, Timothy Dumas, was a supply officer who used his proximity to clandestine missions to steal guns and traffic drugs into the United States from abroad. Drawing on trial transcripts, police records, and hundreds of interviews, Harp tells a scathing story of narco-trafficking in the Special Forces, drug conspiracies abetted by corrupt police, and blatant military cover-ups.
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