Not dead enough

When floodgates first closed on the Dalles Dam, rising waters swallowed the sacred falls and Celilo, a Native American village whose people lived by the Columbia River's prized salmon. Nelson Queah, a Wasco war veteran who had fought the dam bitterly, was watching from the shore when he disappeared that night in 1957, and no trace of him was ever found.

Fifty years on, Cal Claxton, a former Los Angeles prosecutor now practicing law in Portland, is still mourning his wife's suicide. At the request of his friend Philip Lone Deer, he attends a memorial for the flooding and meets Philip's cousin, Winona Cloud, Nelson's granddaughter. Winona has found letters Nelson wrote to his wife just before he vanished, and they point toward murder rather than an accident. They also contradict the account of an old witness who claimed Nelson had been drunk beside the river.

Cal agrees to reopen the cold case and tracks down the man who spread that story, only to find him dead, shot by a sniper. Now Cal has seen the gunman and is a target himself. He must stay ahead of a patient killer while moving between Native and white communities and between police departments that do not want to cooperate.

The investigation runs into Oregon politics, since several men who built the dam are still living, and some remain powerful. Meanwhile, activists are debating whether dams still make sense as new energy sources emerge and the salmon runs shrink, and Cal finds himself drawn to the bold and beautiful Winona.