Marcie R. Rendon

Sinister Graves

Murder on the Red River (MN Edition)

A Novel

Where They Last Saw Her

Girl Gone Missing

Set in 1970s along Red River Valley, Marcie R. Rendon’s gripping new mystery follows the life of a young Ojibwe woman as she struggles to come to terms with the callous murder of a Native American stranger, bringing to life the gritty, dark reality of a flawed foster care system and the oppression of indigenous people. Renee “Cash” Blackbear, a 19-year-old, tough-as-nails, resilient Ojibwe woman, has lived all her life in Fargo, sister city to Minnesota’s Moorhead, just downriver from the Cities. Her life revolves around driving truck for local farmers, drinking beer, playing pool, smoking cigarettes, and seeing visions that guide her to solving murders. She has one friend, Sheriff Wheaton, who’s also her guardian and helped out of the broken foster care system. So there they are, staring at the dead Indian lying in the field. Soon Cash was dreaming of the dead man's cheap house on the Red Lake Reservation, his wife and kids awaiting his arrival from work. That's the place to start looking, but there's a long and dangerous way to go to find the men who killed him.

Murder on the Red River

"Marcie Rendon is writing an addictive and authentically Native crime series propelled by the irresistible Cash Blackbear—a warm, sad, sharp, funny and intuitive young Ojibwe woman. I want a shelf of Cash Blackbear novels! To my delight I have a feeling that Rendon is only getting started." —Louise Erdrich, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Night Watchman Set in 1970s Minnesota on the White Earth Reservation, Pinckley Prize–winner Marcie R. Rendon’s gripping new mystery follows Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman, as she attempts to discover the truth about the disappearances of Native girls and their newborns. A snowmelt has sent floodwaters down to the fields of the Red River Valley, dragging the body of an unidentified Native woman into the town of Ada. The only evidence the medical examiner recovers is a torn piece of paper inside her bra: a hymnal written in English and Ojibwe. Cash Blackbear, a 19-year-old Ojibwe woman, sometimes helps Sheriff Wheaton, her guardian, on his investigations. Now she knows her search for justice for this anonymous victim will take her to the White Earth Reservation, a place she once called home. When Cash happens upon two small graves in the yard of a rural, “speak-in-tongues kinda church,” Cash is pulled into the lives of the malevolent pastor and his troubled wife while yet another Native woman dies in a mysterious manner.

Amateur sleuth Cash Blackbear is helping local law enforcement again—this time with finding a missing girl. This Edgar Award–winning follow-up to Murder on the Red River sees Marcie Rendon’s heroine risking life and limb to protect her community. In small-town Minnesota in the 1970s, it’s the tail-end of the age of peace and love, but 19-year-old Cash Blackbear isn’t feeling it. Bored by freshman English 101 and even less interested in the increasingly popular American Indian Movement, all she wants is to play pool, learn judo, chain-smoke, and be left alone. But then one of Cash’s classmates vanishes without a trace, and Cash can’t stop dreaming about terrified girls begging for help. Plus, she has an unexpected houseguest: a brother she didn’t know existed has moved into her living room, and he’s having violent Vietnam flashbacks that Cash doesn’t know how to handle. When Sheriff Wheaton, the man responsible for rescuing Cash from foster care, asks for Cash’s help with the case of the missing girl, she must overcome her apprehension about leaving her hometown . . . along with her rule never to get in somebody else’s car. Although Cash has been in big trouble before, this might just be her biggest trouble yet. Cash is whip-smart and tough-talking, as brave as she is vulnerable. Surrounded by a colorful cast of characters ranging from ditzy hippies to aggressive drunkards, and constantly being underestimated by the white administrators in charge of her day-to-day college existence, Cash must navigate not only being a Native American teenager living on her own for the first time—but also what responsibility she has to the other people in her life. Written in wry, fast-moving prose, Girl Gone Missing paints a vivid portrait of the 1970s and speaks to a powerful truth about the treatment of Native women and girls in America.

Marcie R. Rendon

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