Murder on the Red River

by Marcie R. Rendon

Overview

One Book, One Minnesota Selection for Summer 2021
 
Introducing Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman whose visions and grit help solve a brutal murder in this award-winning debut.

1970s, Red River Valley between North Dakota and Minnesota: Renee “Cash” Blackbear is 19 years old and tough as nails. She lives in Fargo, North Dakota, where she drives truck for local farmers, drinks beer, plays pool, and helps solve criminal investigations through the power of her visions. She has one friend, Sheriff Wheaton, her guardian, who helped her out of the broken foster care system.

One Saturday morning, Sheriff Wheaton is called to investigate a pile of rags in a field and finds the body of an Indian man. When Cash dreams about the dead man’s weathered house on the Red Lake Reservation, she knows that’s the place to start looking for answers. Together, Cash and Wheaton work to solve a murder that stretches across cultures in a rural community traumatized by racism, genocide, and oppression.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781641293778
Publisher:	Soho Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Series:	A Cash Blackbear Mystery , #1
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	35,684
File size:	883 KB

About the Author

Marcie Rendon is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, a Pinckley Prize–winning author, playwright, poet, freelance writer, and a community arts activist. Rendon was awarded the McKnight Distinguished Artist Award for 2020. She is a speaker on Native issues, leadership, and writing. Her second Cash Blackbear mystery, Girl Gone Missing, was nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award. Rendon was recognized as a 50 over 50 Change-maker by AARP Minnesota and Pollen in 2018. She lives in Minneapolis.

Editorial Reviews

01/30/2017
An appealing 19-year-old heroine, Renee “Cash” Blackbear, lifts Rendon’s first mystery, set in Fargo, N.Dak., and—on the other side of the Red River—Moorhead, Minn. Sheriff Wheaton rescued Cash at age three in the aftermath of the accident in which her drunken mother rolled the family car containing Cash and her brother and sister. Lawfully separated from her family in what she considers a kidnapping, Cash grew up in a series of foster homes. Feisty, sensitive, and smart, Cash is now a farm laborer and a pool shark, and her only real friend is Wheaton. When she hears a radio announcer say one morning that Wheaton has found a body in a field on the Minnesota side of the river, she drives to the crime scene. There Wheaton enlists her aid in investigating the stabbing death of Day Dodge, a native worker from the Red Lake Reservation. Mystery readers should know that Rendon, the author of Pow Wow Summer and other children’s books, focuses more on the abuses Native Americans suffer than on the efforts to solve Dodge’s brutal murder. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Murder on the Red River

“[Rendon] is one heck of a mystery novelist. Rendon’s Cash Blackbear books are gripping vehicles that tell broader stories about the historical persecution of American Indians.”
—Oprah Daily
 
“[A] searing, soaring, and ultimately unflinching story of how Native people persevere in the face of policies and people that seek to destroy the essence of who they are.”
—Debbie Reese, co-editor of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

“Marcie Rendon’s debut, Murder on Red River, features the magnetic Cash: aged-out foster child, girl pool shark, truck driver from Minnesota’s White Earth reservation . . . Rendon writes of with flat-out authority.”
—Lisa Sandlin, author of Dashiell Prize–winning The Do-Right

“Marcie Rendon, a member of the White Earth Anishinabe Nation, masterfully weaves two stories in a seamless, vivid narrative.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“This accomplished author has clearly undertaken more than a murder story . . . she finds new depth and an ample storytelling platform for her informed views on the historic persecution of Indians.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Funny, unflinching, and almost noir in tone, this book is a winner for those with a taste for classic detective fiction with a deeply modern flair.”
—Buzzfeed
 
“[Marcie] Rendon delves deep into the history of Native American communities and the danger of forcing assimilation on a community outside the mainstream of American cultural norms.”
—Twin Cities Pioneer Press
 
“Feisty, sensitive, and smart.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A powerful and compelling read that sheds light on the lived experiences of indigenous people, the issues they face and the power of one individual to make a difference.”
—The Reading Lists

“Marcie Rendon’s portrait of a Native woman detective is vibrant and rooted in the complexities of history and a place haunted by a violent past that refuses to loosen its grip.”
—Jeff Berglund, Ph.D., Director of Liberal Studies, Northern Arizona University
 
“Cash’s life experiences emerge as both landscape and resource to an investigation that engages the reader to the end.”
—David Beaulieu, PhD, Professor of American Indian Education, University of Minnesota, Duluth. Enrolled White Earth Ojibwe
 
“This first novel by Marcie Rendon is remarkable.”
—Kathryn Swanson, Augsburg College


Praise for the Cash Blackbear Mysteries

“Rendon infuses her novels with compassion for Indigenous women who are missing or killed and never found. Cash’s toughness, commitment to justice and vulnerability honor those women.”
—Pioneer Press

“Rendon’s mystery novels simultaneously inform and entertain readers, presenting current Native American issues through her heroine’s efforts to solve crimes perpetrated against society’s more vulnerable members in the early 1970s . . . Rendon’s stories create a world for Cash that readers will want to inhabit.”
—Chicago Review of Books

From the Publisher

2017-01-23
A wild child uneasily transplanted from the White Earth Reservation to a rented house in Fargo meets murder.Though she needs a bogus ID to get served at the bars where she shoots a mean game of pool, Cash, nee Renee Blackbear, 19, already has a lot of miles on her. Taken away from the rez as a child, she's been in and out of more foster homes than she can remember; she's been smoking and drinking since she was 11; and she doesn't mind the fact that her latest lover, farmer Jim Jenson, is married. But even Cash has never seen a murdered man before the August day in 1970 when she follows a radio announcement about a dead body to the Minnesota side of the Red River, where she finds her long-suffering guardian, Sheriff Wheaton, standing over the corpse of a stabbing victim presumed to have come from the Red Lake Reservation. Wheaton has no jurisdiction over a federal reservation, but that doesn't stop Cash, driven by another of the vivid waking dreams she's known for, from driving her Ranchero the 100-plus miles to Red Lake to ask Josie Day Dodge where her husband is. The dead man is indeed Josie Day's husband, nicknamed Tony O for baseball skills that rival those of Twins star Tony Oliva, and another vision brings Cash perilously close to the three men who killed him. The plot in Rendon's adult debut never exactly thickens—this is more coming-of-age story than mystery—but the spare prose-poetry of her descriptions and dialogue is a lot more interesting than anything she has to say about crime or detection.

Kirkus Reviews