This award-winning novel is set in the 1970s on both sides of the Red River, which is the border between the US states of Minnesota and North Dakota. It was first published in 2017 in the US and is now arriving in the UK. Author Marcie R Rendon is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation of Minnesota, and her tale of young Ojibwe woman Cash Blackbear has been followed by three more books in the series.
In this first book, Cash is 19. She was taken from her home, her alcoholic mother and her two siblings as a young child and delivered to one white foster family in the county then another. She learned not to complain, not to eat any food in the house unless it was given to her, to keep her thoughts to herself and to work hard. She made perfect grades in school despite the odds, and now that she’s old enough to live independently, she drives the trucks that transport local farmers’ crops to market or processing.
The local sheriff who rescued her from a car accident when she was three is still in her life and has followed her erratic progress from home to home all these years. He’s rented an apartment where she lives above an appliance store and generally looks out for her. He knows she smokes too many cigarettes and drinks too much beer, purchased, he also knows, with fake identification. But he lets that go. Cash hangs out in bars and shoots pool and is so good at it that, most months it covers her rent. Playing pool isn’t destructive, per se, of course, but being out late at night in honky-tonk bars where the pool-playing events are held does expose her to certain dangers.
Sheriff Wheaton has come to understand that Cash’s flashes of intuition – visions, she calls them – help her understand situations and events, including, occasionally, his crime scenes. As the story opens, the body of an Indian man has just been found and the sheriff asks her opinion. The man, dead of two stab wounds, was a member of the Red Lake band of Chippewa. Because that reservation is closed to outsiders, Wheaton cannot go there, and the residents probably wouldn’t answer his questions if he could, but Cash can go. He wants her to try to find and inform the dead man’s family.
State authorities cannot go onto the reservation, either, and two federal agents arrive to investigate the murder. Wheaton’s aim is to solve the crime before the feds do and, with Cash’s help, he thinks he can. You may wonder, as I did, what is the role of the tribal police here? They feature so prominently in Tony Hillerman’s Navajo novels and Craig Johnson’s Longmire series. At Red Lake, the tribal police have jurisdiction only over misdemeanours, and federal authorities are called in to deal with felonies.
Rendon well describes the physical distances, the rural farming culture, the precarious incomes of the local population and, much worse, the impoverishment of native communities. When one of Cash’s visions leads her to the dead man’s family, their circumstances are heart-rending. That Cash, so young, with so few advantages is doing as well as she is is a testament to her strong spirit. Sheriff Wheaton says Cash is the smartest person he knows, and asking for her help launches an engrossing story that will put Cash in peril more than once.
In the US, Murder on the Red River is published by Soho Crime, which also publishes the work of Ramona Emerson, whose protagonist is a Navajo forensic photographer. The publisher hosted an online discussion between the two authors about the use of visions in both their works. They say that this feature of their stories shouldn’t be regarded as paranormal. They haven’t pasted some artificial or supernatural element onto their stories. Dreams and visions are “…just part of who we are,” Rendon said.
This story may lead you to want to explore the world of Cash Blackbear further, and there are three more novels that will let you do that.
Viper
Print/Kindle/iBook
£9.97
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
