Dead Ink to publish laFavor’s mysteries for first time in the UK

Dead Ink Books has secured Along the Journey River and Evil Dead Center by Carole laFavor, marking the first time they will be published in the UK.

Publishing director Nathan Connolly acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Jeffery Moen at University of Minnesota Press. Both novels will be published simultaneously in September 2022.  

“Ultimately, the re-release of Carole laFavor’s novels serves to underscore the significance of her writing to the Indigenous literary canon, to remind us of the power of her activism for HIV-positive Native peoples and to return her important claims for the centrality of Two-Spirit peoples, bodies and histories to the public eye,” wrote Lisa Tatonetti, associate professor of English at Kansas State University. 

The author was a Two-Spirit Ojibwa novelist and activist who lived and worked in Minnesota. She was a member of the President’s Advisory Council on HIV/Aids in the 1990s and worked with organisations who supported Native American people with the disease. She died in 2011. 

The two novels with Dead Ink make up laFavor’s Renee LaRoche crime mysteries. Along the Journey River, the first instalment, sees LaRoche investigate the theft of sacred artifacts from the Minnesota Red Earth Reservation and the murder of tribal chairman Jed Morriseau.  

Evil Dead Centre follows LaRoche as she becomes embroiled in the case of a dead Ojibwa woman on the Minnesota Red Earth Reservation which leads to an investigation of the foster care system and the deep trauma it has inflicted on the Ojibwa people.  

Theresa laFavor, daughter of the author, said: “I am thrilled that the Dead Ink Books team is publishing my mother’s books in the UK and Europe. It reaffirms that not only was my mother a talented and accomplished writer but that her perspective and the stories she wanted to share are important to communities across the globe. While these books are the first of their genre (lesbian, Native, mysteries), they are stories that anyone can access and relate to: difficulties balancing and protecting long-held cultural practices and customs with new and changing times, seeking belonging, companionship and partnership across cultures and identities, parenting and being in community with others, and fighting for justice and equity.” 

Connolly added: “At the heart of each book is a clash between darkness and light, reality and possibility, pain and hope. Carole laFavor traverses it all with compassion and a keen understanding of what propels people through life and equally what stops them. As crime novels they deserve to take their place in the canon after finally making it to the UK.”