Broken Fields

Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman, is back on the case after two men are found dead on a rural farm in Minnesota in the next installment of the acclaimed Native crime series.

1970s Minnesota. It's spring in the Red River Valley and Cash Blackbear is hoping to make some spending money doing spring field work for local farmers while attending college, and she finds a dead man on the kitchen floor of the property's rented farmhouse. The only possible witness to the murder is the young daughter of a Native laborer. The girl is too terrified to speak about what she's witnessed, and her parents seem to have vanished.

In the wake of the murder, Cash can't deny her intuitive abilities: she is suspicious of the dead man's grieving widow, who offers to take in the girl temporarily. While Cash scours the county and White Earth reservation trying to find the missing mother before the girl is placed in the care of a social worker, the same woman who placed Cash in foster care a decade earlier, another body turns up. Concerned about the girl's fate, and with the help of local Sheriff Wheaton, Cash races against the clock to figure out the truth of what happened in the farmhouse.

“Broken Fields” is a compelling, fast read with seamlessly woven in details of rural life, the American Indian Movement, abusive labor practices, and women's liberation.