Native Arcana doesn’t ease you in—it grabs you by the collar, throws you into a blast, and dares you to look away.

This book has grit. It’s soaked in real talk, tragedy, folklore, and violence. You feel every punch, every loss, every flicker of memory. Nita Ross, the main character, is not just some badge-toting marshal. She’s layered. Tough as old leather but still bleeding inside. Her pain is palpable, and her strength is relentless.

The book opens on the Oklahoma City bombing and never lets go. It leaves a mark on her and on the readers. Nita is a survivor of this tragic event and has faced a multitude of heartaches throughout her life. Caughman has crafted an incredibly relatable character readers will find themselves clinging to and rooting for throughout her story. It’s part crime thriller, part Native myth, and part emotional gut punch. And it all works.

The dialogue is sharp and natural. Just people talking like people do. There’s no highbrow nonsense. Just raw words and even more raw feelings. The writing hits like a slow-burning bonfire. Warm one minute, raging the next. And just when you settle in—bam—a masked killer with owl eyes shows up.

This story mixes the real and the surreal, crime scenes and shapeshifters, meth and mysticism. And the pacing is wild. One minute you’re watching a kid draw maps, the next you’re in a moonlit brawl in the woods, getting slammed into trees and hunting a monster-man in an owl mask.

And the setting, Eastern Oklahoma, breathes on every page. The dusty roads, the fried food diners, the broken towns, the old men who never left. It feels lived-in. Like the place itself has stories it won’t tell you unless you ask real nice.

But make no mistake, this isn’t a whodunit with clean clues and neat endings. It’s messy. Personal. Deep. It’s about ghosts, literal and not. It’s about culture and loss. It’s about being Cherokee in a world that doesn’t always see you. And it’s about fighting anyway.

I highly recommend C.J. Caughman’s Native Arcana to any reader looking for a thrill ride of a tale. This ain’t your average crime novel. It’s weirder. It’s heavier. It’s better. Read it. But buckle up first.