A supernatural horror series set on death row at Bellweather, where the dead speak in the voices of the living, and one man who came back from his own execution has to decide what he owes them.
Eight minutes after his heart stopped, Elias Mercer started breathing again. Back on Row Nine, the voices came with him: the living and the dead, in their own words, asking for small things only someone still breathing can do. Mara, the night nurse watching him, says her voice has been used three times. Mercer never asked for any of it. Nobody on the Row thinks that matters.
When the voices follow you beyond Bellweather, the truth becomes more dangerous than the lie.
Some choices cannot be undone. And some doors should never have been opened.
“Every voice told the truth. That was the beginning of the problem.”From The Voices Were Correct
What Dead Men Ask For is being produced for audio, narrated by Charles Conover. Release details will be posted here as soon as they are set.
The Voices Were Correct is being written now and is scheduled for release in March 2027. The Door We Leave Open follows in October 2027.
“Brilliant psychological horror!” The first Amazon review of What Dead Men Ask For, from a verified purchase.
Richard Donovan has spent the last ten years working in addiction treatment, as a counselor, a program director, and an adjunct professor. He writes about the places where guilt, mercy, and consequence share a room.
What Dead Men Ask For is his first novel, and the first book of the Row Nine trilogy. The series is published by Row Nine Publishing, a division of Row Nine Industries.
Bellweather is a prison. Row Nine is its death row, inside the North Segregation unit, where the state keeps the men it has finished with.
They arrive through phones, walls, and receivers, in the exact voices of people living and dead, carrying things Mercer was never told and could not know.
The dead do not ask for vengeance. They ask for small, concrete things: a chair moved so a mother can see out a window. Debts only the living can settle.
Hearing them accurately is the whole job, and it is not free. Every voice told the truth. That was the beginning of the problem.
Get updates on new releases, the audiobook, behind the scenes notes, and extras from the Row Nine series. No noise. The Row is quiet enough already.