Deaf Row Mysteries

Retired to a small Colorado mountain town, former Denver homicide detective Woodrow “Mountain” Bell yearns only to fade away. He has failed in so many ways—as a father, a husband, friend, and cop—he fears he wasted his chance at a meaningful life.

When Bell stumbles across a long-forgotten, unsolved child murder, his first impulse is to let it lie—but he can’t. He is drawn into the macabre mystery when he realizes the killer might still be near.

Without help from ambivalent local cops, Bell must overcome the obstacles of time, age, a lack of police resources, and his own personal flaws by calling upon the unique skills of the end-of-the-road codgers he meets for coffee every morning—a club of old guys who call themselves Deaf Row. Soon, this mottled crew finds itself on a collision course with a serial butcher.

More than a tense mystery, more than an unnerving psychological thriller, Deaf Row is drawn from Ron Franscell’s career as a bestselling true-crime writer and journalist. It’s a novel of men pushing back against time and death, trying not to disappear entirely.

Deaf Row is a moving, occasionally humorous, portrait of flawed people caught in a web of pain and regret.