Silent Are the Dead

by D. M. Rowell

Overview

A Kiowa woman faces new threats to her tribe and identity while struggling to keep her Silicon Valley business afloat. She must search deep within herself to find answers—and a murderer—in Mary Higgins Clark Award finalist D. M. Rowell’s thrilling sequel, perfect for fans of Winter Counts.

While back on tribal land, Mud Sawpole uncovers an illegal fracking operation underway that threatens the Kiowas’ ancestral homeland. But there’s an even greater threat: a local businessman involved in artifact thefts is murdered, and a respected tribe elder faces accusation of the crime. After being roped in by her cousin, Denny, they begin to investigate the death while also pursuing evidence to permanently stop frackers from destroying Kiowa land, water, and livelihoods.

When answers evade her, Mud heeds her grandfather's and great-aunt’s words of wisdom and embraces Kiowa tribal customs to find the answers that she seeks. But her ceremonial sweat leads to a vision with answers wrapped in more questions.


Mud and Denny race against the clock to uncover the real killer and must face the knowledge that there may be a traitor—and a murderer—in their midst. It’s already too late for one victim—and Mud may be next.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639104994
Publisher:	CROOKED LANE BOOKS
Publication date:	11/19/2024
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	113,745
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

D. M. Rowell (Koyh Mi O Boy Dah) is an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe in Oklahoma. Like her protagonist, Mud, she comes from a long line of Kiowa storytellers within a Plains Indian culture that treasures oral traditions. After a thirty-two-year career spinning stories for Silicon Valley start-ups and corporations, with a few escapes creating award-winning independent documentaries, Rowell started a new chapter writing the Mud Sawpole Mysteries featuring a Silicon Valley professional Kiowa woman solving thefts and murders in Kiowa country. The first in the series, Never Name the Dead was a 2023 Finalist for the Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award. The second novel in the series, Silent Are the Dead, will be released November 19, 2024.

Editorial Reviews

09/02/2024

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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Silent Are the Dead:
“[Rowell] elegantly threads tangible details about tribal life into the action, which remains propulsive throughout.”
—Publishers Weekly

“An immersive cultural experience with Kiowa culture and language wrapped in a mystery plot.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Silent Are the Dead is the story of one Kiowa storyteller lovingly told by another.”
—J. A. Jance, New York Times bestselling author of Blessing of the Lost Girls

“Mud Sawpole is a favorite new amateur sleuth of our times . . .The specificity in D. M. Rowell’s work shines light on little-known historical facts . . . [and] brings the past alive, deepening knowledge of and empathy for the writer’s people.”
—Naomi Hirahara, Edgar and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of the Mas Arai mysteries and the bestselling Japantown mysteries

“A thrilling and character-driven mystery, Silent Are the Dead is D. M. Rowell’s best yet. Mud Sawpole makes for a memorable protagonist that readers will not soon forget, and Rowell’s novel mixes Kiowa culture and a razor-sharp, riveting plot to create a worthy installment in the Mud Sawpole series. I was hooked from page one.”
—Alex Segura, bestselling author of Secret Identity and Alter Ego

“Once again, D. M. Rowell joins Tony Hillerman as a great writer of top mysteries . . . If Killers of the Flower Moon caught your fancy, you won’t want to miss this one!”
—Eric Redman, author of the ITW finalist Bones of Hilo and Death in Hilo

“I love what Rowell is doing with her Mud Sawpole mysteries. Mud is a hero with a foot in two worlds, trying to reconcile her mixed heritage and her absence from home with her calling to be a storyteller for her tribe. The breakneck plotting in Silent Are the Dead involving stolen artifacts and illegal fracking combined with Kiowa culture and traditions makes it hard to put this book down. I can't wait for Mud's next adventure."
—Joshua Moehling, author of And There He Kept Her and Where the Dead Sleep

From the Publisher

Narrator Katie Rich matches the youthful tone and spunky energy of Mud Sawpole, a Kiowa woman with a Silicon Valley business, as she returns to her home to find a missing priceless artifact, the Jefferson Peace Medal. Rich portrays complex characters and recounts Indigenous history at a fast clip, engaging listeners at both an emotional and an intellectual level. A room full of venomous snakes, the disappearance of a body, and more make it clear that someone doesn't want Mud to recover the artifact. A threat from frackers ratchets up the tension as Mud and her cousin, Denny, race to preserve local air and water quality, return the missing artifact to the Kiowa museum, and free a tribal elder who has been falsely accused of murder. R.O. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2024 - AudioFile

2024-08-30
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.

Kirkus Reviews