Inside the Silver Light
by Leah Martin

Nature has gone mad in the Badlands of South Dakota, a landscape of the forbidden where nature's big and strong have not triumphed, but rather the small and weak. A hidden murder on the Pine Ridge Reservation brings three women into a tangle of revenge, broken love, death, and redemption.

Inside the Silver Light will particularly interest readers of contemporary Western and quality women’s fiction. Author Leah Martin lived on the Pine Ridge reservation for four years, where she worked as a volunteer teacher.

Her novel offers an insightful look at the unrest and conflict that remained buried among the Lakota people after the suppression of the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee in the 1970’s. A ten-year-old boy whose parents were killed during this time has come of age. This man brings Native Americans, cowboys, Jesuits, mission teachers, and other people on the reservation together in tragic and mysterious ways.

The imaginative, fast-moving plot revolves around the three women on the reservation. Winnie, the Lakota wife of a white rancher, and mission teachers Kate and Mara are caught in a triangle of revenge, redemption and love. The unusual landform, the Badlands, serves as a metaphor for the turbulence found in the novel.

Leah Martin has published short fiction with Ha’penny Press. Inside the Silver Light is her first novel. She studied writing for three years under the tutelage of novelist Leonard Bishop and was a member of Salina, Kansas based Southwind Writers for ten years. As an in-progress manuscript, Inside the Silver Light placed as a finalist in the Frontiers in Writing contest hosted by the Panhandle Professional Writers of Amarillo, Texas.

Click here to read Chapter One.