At some point this year I saw a series of tweets. I cannot recall exactly when they were, or how far apart, but they led to me ordering Marcie Rendon’s “Murder on the Red River” from Birchbark Books in Minneapolis.
The first tweet featured an article listing books by Native authors, and after some searching I’m fairly certain it was this one from Buzzfeed. While scrolling through, I was drawn to the description of Rendon’s book, probably because when in doubt, a mystery story with a noir-ish hook is usually going to satisfy my reading interests.
The second tweet, well, I am sad to report I cannot remotely find it. It was a list of Native-owned book stores, and it seemed only right to order this particular book from one on the list, and that’s how I ended up with a delivery from Birchbark.
Rendon’s protagonist is Cash, a 19-year-old farm worker whose entire life is in the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota. She is a pool ace and operates with a perpetual chip on her shoulder, one earned in her youth bouncing from one awful foster home to another.
When a Native man is found dead, Rendon reveals Cash has both the ability to use her senses to feel and see what others cannot, and to draw on her knowledge and background to seek out the man’s family and get answers the local and federal authorities cannot.
Rendon beautifully portrays Cash’s surroundings, dropping the reader deep into a landscape that Cash traverses in her truck as she works local pool halls, finds work, and carries out her relationship with a fellow pool player named Jim who has the advantages in life she was not born with.
“She looked at Jim. His pale skin. His blond hair combed back. His forearms tan from working in the fields. He wasn’t that many years older than her but he would inherit acres from his daddy’s farm. Acres given free to his immigrant granddaddy. Probably stolen from her granddaddy. No matter how much she loved this Valley, no one was going to give her a homestead, not after they’d already stolen it from her.”
Where I found this story most enjoyable was in the sections where Cash is on her own, working through her own self doubt and embedded ways as well as putting to use her skills to unravel the mystery. Cash is at her best in a quiet moment letting the land envelope her.
“It was early afternoon when she pulled into Josie’s driveway. No one was in sight. Cash got out of the truck and walked up to the house. No child answered her knock, but Cash felt like she was being watched. She looked around but didn’t see anyone, didn’t see any movement that would tell her where whoever it was, was. The birds were silent, so someone had to be around,” Rendon writes. “Cash walked around the corner of the house and down the path that led to the shore. The traps and fishing nets hung lifeless from the trees. Even the boat already looked forlorn. Sadness permeated the air. Cash stood at the lakeshore and looked out onto the expanse of Red Lake.”
This is an ideal book to read outside with the sound of rustling leaves. Or anywhere, really.