Charles Bloom Murder Mysteries

Bloom's on Canyon Road, specializing in contemporary Native American art, once was a powerhouse gallery in Santa Fe. Then it lost its best-known artist, Willard Yellowhorse. Worse yet was Yellowhorse's premature death soon after arriving in New York City under very suspicious circumstances. With Yellowhorse's final painting STRUGGLE, about to be sold at auction, gallery owner Charles Bloom's inner voice keeps asking two unrelenting questions: how did Willard Yellowhorse really die, and who if anyone killed him? The answers for Charles lay somewhere deep inside the Navajo nation, Yellowhorse's ancestral home.

When a murder occurs on Doc Riddly's watch, the talk turns to skin-walkers, gamblers, weavers, and drugs. Everyone is a suspect, including the doctor. Riddly reaches out to the only other bilagaana he knows on the rez, art dealer Charles Bloom. Unbeknownst to Bloom, a string of savage murders is closer than he can imagine. By helping the doctor, Bloom exposes himself and his girlfriend, weaver Rachael Yellowhorse, to a cold-blooded killer's wrath.

For 1,000 years a hidden canyon on Rachael Yellowhorses ancestral lands and the adjacent property owned by the Manygoats family has protected a masterpiece of petroglyphs deep inside the Navajo nation. These ancient works of art hold a secret with a power so strong their Anasazi makers kept them out of the reach of mere mortal human beings. At his Santa Fe Indian Market show, gallery owner Charles Bloom unwittingly promotes the sacred rock-art images and sets in motion a cascading series of events that leads to the worst kind of human being searching out these hidden petroglyphs. Little could Bloom know that his discerning eye for art would connect him to a chain of murders stretching back 40 years earlier and to an individual who is not a collector of Native art but a psychopathic killer, the likes of which the Dine...have no word to describe.

Gallup, New Mexico, near the Navajo Reservation, is home base for an exclusive group of turquoise dealers known as stone men. When the most successful among them, "the President," stumbles onto the greatest turquoise find in decades, unfortunately for him it's on Navajoland and he's not the only one who wants a piece of the claim.  

Prehistoric pots worth millions hidden on a high cliff in Wupatki National Monument hold vital clues to prehistoric agriculture and migrations - and to Santa Fe art dealer Charles Bloom's own future. To ensure his family's safety, Bloom must uncover the meaning of a pot-hunter's plunder, expose an unethical international gallery owner, and solve a 1,000-year-old mystery that centers on his Canyon Road art gallery.

The sixth book in the Charles Bloom Murder Mystery series… In 1961, two Navajo boys must bet each other’s lives - and risk their most prized possessions - to escape the wrath of the sadistic headmaster of a Gallup Indian boarding school. The white devil and his spawn will stop at nothing - not even murder - to acquire the objects of their desire. Fifty years later, a brush with death draws Rachael Yellowhorse and Charles Bloom back to the Navajo reservation, where they unwittingly stumble on a decades-old secret of child abuse and stolen heirlooms.