Dead Silver »

Neil McMahon was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. The author of six novels, he is also a carpenter in Missoula, where his wife runs the Montana Arts Festival.

After a twenty-year absence Renee Callister is back in Helena, Montana, to bury her estranged father. John Callister was a local pariah believed to have had a hand in his wife's murder when she was protesting the opening of a controversial silver mine. But the discovery of disturbing photographs and one silver earring in her father's home is causing Renee to reexamine her stepmother's death in a shocking new light—and sending her to Hugh Davoren for help.

A California expatriate, Hugh Davoren makes his living under Montana's Big Sky, working as a carpenter with his Blackfoot pal Madbird—and he's always there for a friend. But the truth Renee Callister seeks is buried in dark and dangerous places, and Davoren's going to make some powerful, unforgiving enemies when he digs too deep.

Publishers Weekly

Like Lone Creek, McMahon's first novel to boast a Montana setting, this fine crime novel fairly glows with the big skies, rough country and outsize characters of his home state. Ex-journalist Hugh Davoren, working in Helena as a carpenter with his buddy Madbird, a Blackfoot Indian, is contacted by an old friend, Renee Callister, back in town to bury her father, John Callister, after a 20-year absence. John had lived the latter part of his life in disgrace as the chief suspect in the murder of his second wife, Astrid, and her lover. Renee finds old photographs of a nude Astrid and decides they are clues that will exonerate her late father. She asks Hugh to help her, and, smitten by her beauty and plight, he readily agrees. McMahon ties up several subplots-in particular, Madbird's troubles with his niece, Darcy, who's having an affair with a state representative-in a rather unwieldy knot by the end, but it's the compelling prose, sense of place and sympathetic characters that make the book a joy to read. (June)

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