39. SInister Graves by Marcie R. Rendon

#3 Cash Blackbear

listened on Libby

240 pgs.

2022
Historical Fiction Mystery
Finished 8/18/2026
Goodreads rating: 3.98
My rating: 4
Setting: 1970s Minnesota/ND in/near Ojibwe land

My comments: I like this series.  Cash Blackbear is so imperfect ....and real.  She drinks too much.  She sleeps around too much.  She's had a really tough life, being hoisted from one non-Native American foster home to another.  None of them were "good."  And she's only 19.  Talk about a tough cookie!  She lives to drink beer and play pool.  In this episode, while looking for the identity of a drowned Native American girls, she is thrust into a "holy roller" type small church in the middle of nowhere with a really odd preacher and his wife.  The story moves quickly and takes quite an interesting turn....and then it's over, so quickly!

Goodreads synopsis: 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.