Silent Are the Dead: A Mud Sawpole Mystery

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. (Nov.)