Silent Are the Dead

June 1, 2024

Kiowa author and Mary Higgins Clark Award finalist Rowell offers a sequel to Never Name the Dead. On Kiowa tribal land, Mud Sawpole discovers an illegal fracking operation, a murder, and the theft of artifacts. She and her cousin Denny investigate, trying to figure it out before more people are killed, all while Mud tries to stay alive. Prepub Alert.

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October 1, 2024
One mystery bleeds into another as a Native woman and her cousin seek a missing headdress that may have instigated a murder. Mud Sawpole and her cousin Denny have gathered with their tribal elders to bless the Jefferson Peace Medal outside the Kiowa Museum. Cleansing the medal's negative energy, especially after the duo had to solve a murder to recover the precious symbol, brings a healing sense of contentment to Mud. After the ceremony, she tries to get herself back into the head space of her adopted Silicon Valley home and work, but when she and Denny see that tribe leader Wyatt Walker's office has been tossed, they know the danger isn't over. Is this about the medal, other relics in the museum, or the fracking operation that's commenced on tribal lands? Things get more complicated when the cousins run into Mud's former flame Georgie Crow, who claims that she just saw the body of Gerald Bean, the gallery owner bent on stealing Native art. When Mud and Denny look, the body's gone. Georgie begs them to figure out what's going on to protect Buck, Georgie's ne'er-do-well husband, whom Eli Tonay claims stole his family's headdress. The overlapping mysteries send Mud and Denny on an investigation marked by a room full of venomous snakes, the disappearance of Gerald Bean's body, and enough obstacles to make it clear that someone doesn't want them to learn the truth. An immersive cultural experience with Kiowa culture and language wrapped in a mystery plot.

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September 2, 2024
Rowell’s clever second whodunit featuring Mud Sawpole (after Never Name the Dead) finds the Silicon Valley consultant turned Kiowa gumshoe looking into the murder of a master thief. After returning to Oklahoma from California at the request of her Kiowa storyteller grandfather, Mud helped thwart burglar Gerald Bean’s attempts to steal the Kiowa tribe’s precious Jefferson Peace Medal. Then one morning, Mud’s high school sweetheart, Georgie Crow, stumbles over Bean’s corpse in the tribe’s maintenance hut—but when Mud arrives at the scene, Bean’s body is nowhere to be found. A Kiowa tribal elder whose ancestral headdress was stolen by Bean becomes the prime suspect, but Mud isn’t convinced of his guilt, and she launches her own investigation into the killing alongside her cousin, Denny. Meanwhile, Mud learns of a fracking operation that’s encroaching on Kiowa land and tries to stop it. Rowell, herself a descendant of a Kiowa storyteller, elegantly threads tangible details about tribal life into the action, which remains propulsive throughout. By the time the narrative arrives at its surprising, fair-play conclusion, readers will be convinced this series deserves a long run. Agent: Liz Trupin-Pulli, Jet Literary.