Award-Winning Mystery Writer Ausma Zehanet Khan Presents “Blackwater Falls”

St. Louis County Library’s Favorite Author Series presents Barry Award-winning suspense author Ausma Zehanet Khan for a discussion and signing of “Blackwater Falls,” a new series featuring American Muslim detective Inaya Rahman.

The event will take place on Monday, November 14, at 7:00 p.m. at Daniel Boone Branch, 300 Clarkson Rd., Ellisville, MO 63011.

Books will be available for purchase at the event from The Novel Neighbor.

From critically acclaimed author Ausma Zehanat Khan, “Blackwater Falls” is the first in a timely and powerful crime series, introducing 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 largely ignored. 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 positioned deliberately in a mosque.

Detective Inaya Rahman is recruited to solve Razan’s murder, and quickly uncovers a link to other missing and murdered girls. 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.

Delving deep into racial tensions, and police corruption and violence, “Blackwater Falls” examines a series of crimes within the context of contemporary American politics with compassion and searing insight.

Ausma Zehanat Khan is the author of “The Unquiet Dead,” winner of the Barry Award, the Arthur Ellis Award and the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award for Best First Novel, as well as a 2016 Macavity Award finalist. CrimeReads named Khan one of the Rising Stars of Crime Fiction in the 2010s, and both CrimeReads and Library Journal named her thriller “A Deadly Divide” one of the best crime novels of 2019.

Khan has been featured in a Shondaland profile of Muslim Women Authors Everyone Should Know. ​ Formerly, she served as Editor in Chief of Muslim Girl magazine. The first magazine to address a target audience of young Muslim women, Muslim Girl re-shaped the conversation about Muslim women in North America.

A frequent lecturer and commentator, Khan holds a Ph.D. in international human rights law with a research specialization in military intervention and war crimes in the Balkans, from Osgoode Hall Law School.

Program sites are accessible. With at least two weeks' notice, accommodations will be made for persons with disabilities. Call 314-994-3300 or contact us.