Where They Last Saw Her
A Novel
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4.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the award-winning author of the Cash Blackbear series comes a compelling novel of a Native American woman who learns of the disappearance of one of her own and decides enough is enough.
All they heard was her scream.
Quill has lived on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota her whole life. She knows what happens to women who look like her. Just a girl when Jimmy Sky jumped off the railway bridge and she ran for help, Quill realizes now that she’s never stopped running. As she trains for the Boston Marathon early one morning in the woods, she hears a scream. When she returns to search the area, all she finds are tire tracks and a single beaded earring.
Things are different now for Quill than when she was a lonely girl. Her friends Punk and Gaylyn are two women who don’t know what it means to quit; her loving husband, Crow, and their two beautiful children challenge her to be better every day. So when she hears a second woman has been stolen, she is determined to do something about it—starting with investigating the group of men working the pipeline construction just north of their homes.
As Quill closes in on the truth about the missing women, someone else disappears. In her quest to find justice for all of the women of the reservation, she is confronted with the hard truths of their home and the people who purport to serve them. When will she stop losing neighbors, friends, family? As Quill puts everything on the line to make a difference, the novel asks searing questions about bystander culture, the reverberations of even one act of crime, and the long-lasting trauma of being considered invisible.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This powerful, character-driven mystery is a tough one to shake, because it all feels so unnervingly real. Quill is a middle-aged wife and mom on northern Minnesota’s Red Pine reservation. Indigenous women have gone missing or been found murdered in the area recently, but it’s not until she hears a single scream while out on her morning run that something changes in her. Frustrated by the usual lack of urgency from the local police, she begins her own investigation, with the reluctant help of her girlfriends Gaylyn and Punk and her devoted husband, Crow. Marcie R. Rendon is herself a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and her writing has an insider’s deep knowledge of the area and its culture. Where They Last Saw Her tackles a hot-button issue sensitively and with empathy while still maintaining the pace and tension of a top-notch thriller.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An Ojibwe community organizer investigates the disappearances of two Indigenous women in Rendon's powerful latest (after Sinister Graves). While running on a reservation in northern Minnesota one snowy morning, young mother Quill hears a woman's piercing scream in the woods. After rushing to check out the scene—first alone, then with the help of a tribal cop—all she turns up is an earring with familiar beadwork. Shaken, Quill casts a suspicious eye toward the oil pipeline workers who have recently been encroaching on Ojibwe territory and enlists her friends, Punk and Gaylyn, to help her inquiries. The trio's sleuthing turns up a pattern of violence against Ojibwe women, much of it perpetrated by white patrons at the local casino. The stakes are further raised when a second woman goes missing and Punk abruptly cuts contact with Quill and Gaylyn. Rendon's keen ear for the rhythms of Indigenous speech and Midwestern slang lends authenticity to her tense, wrenching portrait of life on the margins. Add in solid thrills and a conclusion that leaves readers with just the right number of unanswered questions, and Rendon has delivered a top-shelf crime story that doubles as a moving testament to Native American resilience.
