Detective Inaya Rahman

Girls from immigrant communities have been disappearing for months in the Colorado town of Blackwater Falls, but the local sheriff is slow to act and the fates of the missing girls are largely disregarded. At last, the calls for justice become too loud to ignore when the body of a star student and refugee-the Syrian teenager Razan Elkader-is deliberately positioned in a mosque. Detective Inaya Rahman and Lieutenant Waqas Seif of the Denver Police are recruited to solve Razan's murder, and they quickly uncover a link to other missing and murdered girls. But as Inaya gets closer to the truth, Seif finds ways to obstruct the investigation. Inaya may be drawn to him, but she is wary of his motives: he may be covering up the crimes of their boss, whose connections in Blackwater run deep. Inaya turns to her female colleagues, attorney Areesha Adams and Detective Catalina Hernandez, for help in finding the truth. The three have bonded through their experiences as members of vulnerable groups, and now they must work together to expose the conspiracy behind the murders before another girl disappears. A gripping thriller from one of the genre's finest writers, Blackwater Fallsexamines a series of crimes within the context of contemporary American politics with searing insight.

In Blackwater Falls, Colorado, veteran police officer Harry Cooper is hot on the heels of some local vandals when the situation turns deadly: believing one of them has a gun, Harry opens fire and Duante Reed, a young Black man, is killed. The "gun" in his hands was a bottle of spray paint. Meanwhile, in nearby Denver, a drug raid goes south and a Latino teen, Mateo Ruiz, is also killed. The Denver Police force is spread thin between the two cases, and protests on both sides begin. Detective Inaya Rahman and her boss, Lieutenant Waqas Seif, have their work cut out for them to consider the guilt of the perpetrators and their victims. Harry was by all accounts, an officer dedicated to the communities he served. Was this shooting truly a terrible mistake? Is Kelly cut from the same bad cloth as his father? Duante was, to some, a street artist with no prior record, but to others, he was a vandal. Mateo was either in the wrong place at the wrong time, or a dangerous drug dealer. In either case, was lethal force necessary? While Inaya is forced to reckon with her own prejudices and work through those of her colleagues, she must discover the truth of what really happened on one fateful night in Blackwater Walls.