A gritty, enthralling depiction of life on an Indian reservation, Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden was an excellent book by any measure. Published in 2020, it won an Anthony, a Thriller, a Barry and a Macavity Award. It also won Editor’s Choice For Best Debut that in the Crime Fiction Lover Awards 2020. It has only grown in reputation since then, and as a result Wisdom Corner is one of the most highly-anticipated thrillers of the summer – rural noir from a different perspective.
It is a year or so after the events of Winter Counts, and life on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in Colorado goes on. Virgil Wounded Horse is back with Marie, and together they are raising Nathan, Virgil’s nephew. Nathan has put his near fatal overdose behind him, is doing OK at school and now has a regular girlfriend, Shawna.
Marie is standing for election to the tribal council; a tall task as the incumbent is Mitch Gagnon, a career politician who knows where all the bodies are buried, so to speak, and who has a ruthless streak a mile wide. Marie’s shame hasn’t been forgotten – it was her father behind the heroin epidemic that swept the rez in Winter Counts – and she’s worried Gagnon will raise it as the campaign heats up.
Changed by events in the previous novel, Virgil has responsibilities now and means to live up to them. No more smoking, no more drinking and above all no more acting as the unofficial settler of disputes. All too often, he used his fists to end an argument. Marie means to keep Virgil to his word; he’s not setting a good example for Nathan, and he’s fallen on the wrong side of the Tribal Police.
Of course, there would be no need for people like Virgil if the Tribal Police were empowered properly, and if the FBI – the only body that can investigate a felony – actually took an interest in rez affairs.
There are many reasons to read a crime novel, and just as many to write one. Some writers wish nothing more than to entertain, a noble sentiment and you will not find any snobbery at Crime Fiction Lover. For others, crime fiction allows a writer to explore society and to hold up a mirror to its faults, Wanbli Weiden falls firmly in this camp. Both of his novels are illuminating portraits of life for Native Americans on and off reservations, of the battle to preserve indigenous culture in the face colonialism, and of the struggle against injustice, either historical or ongoing.
The author places these issues at the heart of the novel to create a compelling crime drama with several plot threads. Firstly, Virgil finds himself drawn into a dispute, which quickly turns violent, between rival bootleggers who want to claim rez territory as their own. What starts with knives and bottles becomes more deadly, and Wanbli Weiden is as adept at writing action as he is assured at writing character and setting.
Jerome Iron Shell, a respected elder and spiritual leader on the rez, tells Virgil of his involvement in the South Dakota School Land Project. In an effort to weaken native rights, many US states separated young children from their families, taking them from tribal lands and placing them in native boarding schools where they were stripped of their culture and forced at act as whites.
Abuse was rife, and many children died in secret, buried in unmarked graves. The schools may have closed but the states never returned native lands, and have resisted attempts at reparation. Land which should belong to the rez is under threat from rich developers, and an attempt on Iron Shell’s life appears to underline how ruthless can be. For Virgil, the struggle becomes personal when he discovered a distant relative may have been a school victim.
Strong action, a driving plot and themes of injustice are not the only strengths of Wisdom Corner. Reading the novel brings to mind the work of SA Cosby, another American writer who has risen to prominence this decade. In Cosby’s 2020 novel, Blacktop Wasteland, Bug Montage knows he has to give up drag racing for the good of his family, but his addiction to danger proves irresistible.
For Virgil, the rush he gets from violence has the same pull; he knows better but cannot help himself. His battle against himself is as compelling as against any antagonist, and it’s this level of characterisation that elevates Wisdom Corner to the highest echelons of crime fiction.
Simon & Schuster
Print/Kindle
£7.99
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
