In this slow-burn middle-grade murder mystery by Walter Dean Myers Award-winning author Andrea L. Rogers (Man Made Monsters), a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, a family grapples with complicated roots and societal transformation in late-1960s Oklahoma.
Twelve-year-old Cynthia's maternal grandparents are Cherokee, but she knows little about her heritage and is disconnected from her white paternal grandparents. When Cynthia's dad is recruited to teach law at the University of Tulsa, he makes a shaky truce with his parents, agreeing to visit them on their Snake, Okla., ranch. Bill and Martha, Cynthia's "mean grandfather and mousy grandmother," make the family's stay unpleasant. Cynthia and her younger sister explore the grounds and discover a journal written by nine-year-old Violet, whose Cherokee mother owned the property and married Grandfather Bill. Further investigation unveils headstones indicating Violet and her mother died in 1920--the year Grandfather Bill became the ranch owner. At the same time, Cynthia's mom is getting mysteriously sick. Slowly, Cynthia's family realizes they may be in very real danger from their own kin.
Rogers is cannily self-restrained in this complicated, discomfiting novel. She intentionally leaves threads untied, reflecting the convolution of a world where people are forced from their homeland and severed from their culture. Readers who enjoy a flavor of menace and intrigue are likely to be thrilled by Death in the Tallgrass, which makes a good companion to Anna Rose Johnson's The Blossoming Summer and Christine Day's I Can Make This Promise. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor