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Quill is a runner. Ever since she witnessed a boy jump off a railroad bridge to his death when she was a child, she has struggled with anxiety, but running has given her a way to cope. Now, after running a marathon in Duluth, she has plans to run the Boston Marathon, a bold goal for a woman from the Red Pine reservation in northern Minnesota. But one winter day, as she runs a snow-covered path, she hears a woman scream, and it changes everything.
A pipeline is being built across the northern woods and man camps have sprung up to house transient laborers who have brought a sense of unease to the reservation. The men have money to spend at the casino, and they seem to feel they can do whatever they want, given the jurisdictional confusion between tribal police and federal law enforcement that makes violent crimes slip through the cracks. A lot of women have disappeared through those legal fissures, in Canada and the parts of the US where extraction industries plow through reservation land. Quill knows that thousands of women have gone missing and many have been murdered. She's convinced that scream came from a native woman being dragged into the violent sex trade against her will.
Panicked, she runs to her car and tells her husband Crow, who takes it seriously. Too seriously, in a way: he insists she stop running alone. With her two friends, Punk and Gaylen, she begins to run with company, but even that proves not safe enough when they are harassed on a country road and followed by a truck with tinted windows. The situation grows more threatening when two native women are drugged and forced from the casino. One is stopped by a security guard who recognizes her as his cousin, but another vanishes.
Meanwhile, the situation at home is getting testy. Quill and Crow have a good marriage and are careful to raise their two children in a home that is loving and safe, but Quill can't stop trying to find out what happened to the woman who screamed. Crow wants to leave it to the tribal police, who are making a good effort, but Quill can't let it go. She checks the casino parking lot when she drops Gaylen off at her job there, looking for the truck that threatened them, and follows a clue from a beaded earring she picked up in the woods to an addiction treatment center in Duluth.
Her friend Punk drops out of the trio of runners when she injures her leg, and stops answering texts when she falls for a cop who recently joined the Red Pine tribal police, a typical reaction when she has one of her usually short-lived romances, but it's frustrating to Quill. Then a white couple abducts a native girl from the local Walmart, setting the community on high alert.
The subject matter of this novel is difficult, but Rendon handles it with skill. Readers are invited into an Indigenous community, where friendships are warm and a couple are doing everything they can to overcome generational trauma for their children. Though Quill's actions often seem rash and dangerous, they aren't plot-driven moments of jeopardy; they are consistent with her character and with the challenges she faces. The pace is well calibrated, balancing background and events that grow increasingly compelling and tense.
Those who are looking for comforting entertainment might complain it's "too political" but all crime fiction is political; it's just a matter of whether it affirms the status quo or challenges it. Rendon has done the latter with admirable skill and dignifies the genre by taking its power seriously.
§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, September 2024
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