Judith Van Gieson: 13 books

As Neil settles into her new house in Albuquerque's North Valley, she befriends thirteen-year-old Cheyanne Morales, who lives in a nearby trailer with her mother and her younger half brother. Cheyanne's teenage angst is complicated by the pressures that gang culture imposes on her and her peers. Neil...

On one side of the border stands a murder; on the other, a killer. In between stands Neil Hamel, a woman with a passion for the truth. "Don't worry, Chiquita" was the Kid's answer to almost everything, and right now Neil Hamel missed the Kid-her part-time lover and car mechanic. Neil...

The "annual" Saint Patrick's Day party hosted by Tim and Jamie Malone in their small northern New Mexico community is their first in many years. But it also marks their last as they prepare to move to the Midwest. For Albuquerque attorney Neil Hamel, going to the party is a reunion of sorts...

It's a 104 degree day in Albuquerque when attorney/sleuth Neil Hamel gets a call asking her to go to southern New Mexico to help a wolf advocate who calls himself Juan Sololobo. Juan, who attracts trouble wherever he goes, is visiting the town of Soledad to give an educational program featuring his...

It is a devastating tragedy: in the South Canyon of Colorado's Thunder Mountain, a sudden cold front whips a small, containable fire into a raging inferno, killing nine heroic firefighters from the Duke City Hotshots. The US Forest Service blames the dead; a victim's grieving mother charges the government...

When Claire Reynier becomes the victim of credit card fraud, she's stunned to discover that Evelyn Martin, an old college friend and sorority sister, is the culprit. She's even more shocked when Evelyn turns up dead. According to the police, Evelyn also swindled three other former classmates, but...

How could you forget whether or not you murdered somebody? That's exactly what Albuquerque lawyer-cum-sleuth Neil Hamel asks herself when she takes on the defense of an elderly client who can't remember whether she ran over the girl her car surely did kill. Early in the morning of November...

She may be a divorce lawyer, but Neil Hamel uses her PI's instincts when a millionaire's rare indigo macaw and newly endangered wife are kidnapped together. The unusual search puts her right in the heart of New Mexico's breathtaking Plains of San Agustin, for a dangerous game of bird smuggling and...

Jonathan Vail's novel made him famous. His disappearance made him a legend. Thirty-five years ago, the young writer embarked on a camping trip in Utah's Slickrock Canyon, never to be seen again. His journal vanished with him. Now, archivist Claire Reynier, preserver of Vail's legacy, finds herself...

A steady law practice, a stash of tequila, a lover she calls the Kid-only a debt of the heart to her dear, dead aunt Joan could compel Neil Hamel to leave Albuquerque for Montana in search of a bird. No ordinary winged creature, the Arctic falcon is a near-mythic figure, a cool killer who likes the...

For the fifty-year-old, recently divorced Claire Reynier, it's time to start over. But her new direction in life-at a New Mexico university-becomes a detour to murder when an old friend and mentor is found dead. Claire Reynier is thrilled when her old friend Burke Lovell donates his collection...

Archivist Claire Reynier may have a priceless find on her hands. A woman named Isabel Santos has discovered a faded document hidden for hundreds of years under the floor of her family's adobe house. It could be the controversial last words of a Jewish mystic condemned to death by the Inquisition in...

When a young woman is found dead in the basement of the university library-with an illustration from a valuable book beside her-Claire recognizes the victim as someone she had met, but whose name she never knew. To learn more, Claire must descend into the haunting world of the homeless in Albuquerque,...