Murder on the Red River
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
One Book, One Minnesota Selection for Summer 2021
Introducing Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman whose visions and grit help solve a brutal murder in this award-winning debut.
1970s, Red River Valley between North Dakota and Minnesota: Renee “Cash” Blackbear is 19 years old and tough as nails. She lives in Fargo, North Dakota, where she drives truck for local farmers, drinks beer, plays pool, and helps solve criminal investigations through the power of her visions. She has one friend, Sheriff Wheaton, her guardian, who helped her out of the broken foster care system.
One Saturday morning, Sheriff Wheaton is called to investigate a pile of rags in a field and finds the body of an Indian man. When Cash dreams about the dead man’s weathered house on the Red Lake Reservation, she knows that’s the place to start looking for answers. Together, Cash and Wheaton work to solve a murder that stretches across cultures in a rural community traumatized by racism, genocide, and oppression.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Psychic powers come in handy for an Indigenous sleuth looking to solve a gritty murder mystery in the 1970s. Ojibwe antihero Cash Blackbear is a tough-talking, truck-driving, 19-year-old badass living in Fargo, North Dakota. When Sheriff Wheaton—who saved Cash’s life as a child—finds a Native American body on the other side of the Red River in Minnesota, Cash has one of her psychic visions…which clues her into the identity of the dead man, quickly turning her into the partner Wheaton never asked for. Author Marcie R. Rendon laces the first book in the Cash Blackbear mystery series with ample suspense, great characters, and lots of vivid details about Native life. This mystery makes for a full meal, with a heaping side order of stark social reality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An appealing 19-year-old heroine, Renee "Cash" Blackbear, lifts Rendon's first mystery, set in Fargo, N.Dak., and on the other side of the Red River Moorhead, Minn. Sheriff Wheaton rescued Cash at age three in the aftermath of the accident in which her drunken mother rolled the family car containing Cash and her brother and sister. Lawfully separated from her family in what she considers a kidnapping, Cash grew up in a series of foster homes. Feisty, sensitive, and smart, Cash is now a farm laborer and a pool shark, and her only real friend is Wheaton. When she hears a radio announcer say one morning that Wheaton has found a body in a field on the Minnesota side of the river, she drives to the crime scene. There Wheaton enlists her aid in investigating the stabbing death of Day Dodge, a native worker from the Red Lake Reservation. Mystery readers should know that Rendon, the author of Pow Wow Summer and other children's books, focuses more on the abuses Native Americans suffer than on the efforts to solve Dodge's brutal murder.
