Summary
A murdered man in a field. The sheriff needs Cash--a twenty-something tough, smart Indian woman with special seeing powers.
Cash and Sheriff Wheaton make for a strange partnership. He pulled her from her mother's wrecked car when she was three. He's kept an eye out for her ever since. It's a tough place to live--that part of the world where the Red River divides Minnesota and North Dakota.Cash navigated through foster homes, and at 13 was working farms. She's tough as nails--barely over five feet, jeans and jean jacket, smokes Marlboros, drinks Bud Longnecks. Makes her living driving truck. Playing pool on the side. Wheaton is a big lawman type. Scandinavian stock, but darker skin than most. Something else in there? Cash hasn't ever asked. He wants her to take hold of her life. Get into junior college.
So there they are, staring at the dead Indian lying in the field. Soon Cash was dreaming the dead man's HUD house on the Red Lake Reservation, mother and kids waiting. She has that kind of knowing. That's the place to start looking. There's a long and dangerous way to go to find the men who killed him. Plus there's Jim, the married white guy. And Long Braids, the Indian guy headed for Minneapolis to join the American Indian Movement.
Marcie Rendon is a citizen of the White Earth Nation. In 2020, she became the first Native American woman to receive the McKnight Distinguished Artist award. Her novel, Girl Gone Missing , Cinco Puntos Press, is the second in the Cash Blackbear series. The first, Murder on the Red River (2017 Cinco Puntos Press) won the Pinckley Women's Debut Crime Novel Award, 2018. It was a Western Writers of America Spur Award Finalist 2018 in the Contemporary Novel category. Two nonfiction children's books are Pow Wow Summer (MN Historical Press) and Farmer's Market: Families Working Together (CarolRhoda). Rendon was recognized as a 50 over 50 Change-maker by MN AARP and POLLEN, 2018. With four published plays she is the creative mind of Raving Native Theater. She curates community created performance such as Art Is...CreativeNativeResilience which features three Anishinabe performance artists on TPT Public Television, June 2019. Diego Vazquez and Rendon received the Loft's 2017 Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for their work with women incarcerated in county jails.
Rendon was featured in Oprah Magazine's "31 Native American Authors to Read Right Now": "Rendon's Cash Blackbear series are gripping vehicles that tell broader stories about the historical persecution of American Indians."