Murder on the Red River

January 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.

February 1, 2017
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.

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