Where they last saw her A novel

Rendon, a citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, has produced a stunning thriller about Indigenous women who are murdered, raped, or trafficked--an ongoing outrage. (According to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, in any given month in the period 2012--2020, between 27 and 54 Indigenous women were murdered or missing.) The disturbing action kicks off when Quill, a young woman who lives on a HUD reservation in northern Minnesota, is running in the pine forest when she hears a woman's terrified scream. The tribal cops are slow to move after Quill reports the incident, so she takes it upon herself to investigate. A powerful element throughout is the depiction of the daily dangers Quill and her friends face as Indigenous women as they investigate and go about their day-to-day lives, often being harassed by white males who work on the new pipeline. An especially chilling scene takes place when Quill enters a local casino and witnesses a young woman of her tribe being dragged out by two white men. The action, and the peril to Quill and her family and friends, keep intensifying, as two more women go missing. Great characterization and propulsive plot, built around a current, terrifying reality.

An Ojibwe community organizer investigates the disappearances of two Indigenous women in Rendon's powerful latest (after Sinister Graves). While running on a reservation in northern Minnesota one snowy morning, young mother Quill hears a woman's piercing scream in the woods. After rushing to check out the scene--first alone, then with the help of a tribal cop--all she turns up is an earring with familiar beadwork. Shaken, Quill casts a suspicious eye toward the oil pipeline workers who have recently been encroaching on Ojibwe territory and enlists her friends, Punk and Gaylyn, to help her inquiries. The trio's sleuthing turns up a pattern of violence against Ojibwe women, much of it perpetrated by white patrons at the local casino. The stakes are further raised when a second woman goes missing and Punk abruptly cuts contact with Quill and Gaylyn. Rendon's keen ear for the rhythms of Indigenous speech and Midwestern slang lends authenticity to her tense, wrenching portrait of life on the margins. Add in solid thrills and a conclusion that leaves readers with just the right number of unanswered questions, and Rendon has delivered a top-shelf crime story that doubles as a moving testament to Native American resilience. Agent: Jacqui Lipton, Tobias Literary. (Sept.)

A young Native American woman confronts pervasive violence, standing up for others who might be dismissed or forgotten. Quill is running near her home on Minnesota's Red Pine reservation when she hears a scream--and then silence. Spooked, she brings her husband, Crow, to help examine the area the next day, finding signs of a scuffle and a single beaded earring left behind in the snow. The tribal cops search the forest to no avail. So Quill and her two best friends, Punk and Gaylyn, use their community ties to investigate because they know the truth: "There are between two thousand and five thousand missing and murdered Indian women in this country. Nobody gives a shit." This novel is Rendon's way of bringing attention to these often ignored stories. The ravages of racist governmental policies, poverty, and addiction, along with the lawless nature of the camps for men working on the pipelines near the reservation, create a perfect storm of violence. A woman is drugged and nearly kidnapped at a local casino; her cousin is kidnapped, then escapes. When a young girl is abducted from a Walmart bathroom then found murdered, Quill and her friends can no longer stand by in silence. Through it all, they run, finding it a way to quiet the anxiety, the frustration, the anger of being treated by the larger world like they don't count. Quill is a charismatic character, strong and fierce in both her independence and her love for her husband, children, and community, willing to risk herself to keep others safe. This novel is written in protest of the epidemic of missing Indigenous women and centuries of painful history: "We have lived with losing loved ones for century after century." But it also lifts up the healing power of female friendship, motherhood, and generational knowledge: "And we still have babies and keep loving." Rendon's book will break your heart, but it will also inspire and inform. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter One Quill ran the snow-covered trail. In her right hand she carried bear spray and in the left she carried a long stick to ward off the rez dogs that often ran in wild packs. Her breath formed frozen clouds of white air that drifted back over her shoulder. Winter brought its own deep silence to the woods. Dead leaves from the poplar trees and dropped twigs sodden with fall moisture were frozen under the recent snowfall. They didn't crackle and crunch under her running shoes. While the pines were still lush, the deciduous trees had no foliage to rustle. The winter-dead underbrush, bare of leaves, made it possible to see a hundred yards in either direction. The winter forest wasn't as dark and lonely as the summer forest could be. Quill had run Duluth's 26.2-mile Grandma's Marathon the previous June, and after that run she had become determined to train every day all year round to prepare for the Boston Marathon, if not this year, then the next. Out of the corner of her eye Quill spied a rabbit, rusty brown in color, sitting not three feet off the trail. A cottontail. The cottontail stared without blinking or twitching a nose or ear--its survival instinct. Quill kept running. She saw a horned owl sleeping in a tree. Surrounded by forest, the bird's natural habitat, Quill mainly ignored the superstitious fear of owls--the fear that said hearing or seeing one meant death. A lone sparrow quietly hopped from one tree branch to another. Quill ran. Breath in. Breath out. Acutely aware of the life in the trees around her, hitting her stride where she barely felt her feet touch the ground. Deep in a meditative runner's trance, Quill instinctively dropped to her knees and swiveled around, looking in wideeyed terror in all directions, as a high-pitched scream pierced the air. The scream did not repeat. Quill crab-walked to a large jack pine and sat on the cold ground, her back on the tree, pepper spray and stick ready to attack. Why did you wear the neon-pink running suit, fool? she thought as she scanned the forest around her, noticing that both pink knees were dirty from the forest floor. She slid around the tree and scanned the forest in all directions. The forest was even more silent than it had been. Every living creature and plant went to hush with that scream. It was a woman's scream; I swear to god. When the scream didn't repeat, Quill scooted around to the trail side of the tree and quickly scanned up and down the trail. No one else was on it. Quill crouched, keeping her back to the tree trunk. Nothing moved in any direction. She pulled her winter cap off, tilted her head as if that would help her right ear hear better. She was sure the scream came from the right because when she dropped to the ground, she instinctively turned to the right first. Quill felt a chill down her back. The chill that happens when folks say, Someone walked over my grave. She checked her watch. When she'd decided to train for the Boston Marathon, she'd splurged and bought herself a running watch. Her friends teased her about being bougie and getting a "white runner's" watch. But it told her the time, with a GPS system, heart and oxygen status, and music, and told her how many miles she ran. Now it told her her heart was beating way above normal at two-fifteen in the afternoon and that she was three miles into the woods, which meant three miles back to the gravel road everyone called Cemetery Road, where her car sat. And another fifteen miles of reservation road to get back home. She glanced in all directions, cautiously took her time to raise herself to a full standing position, and took off running to her car. Excerpted from Where They Last Saw Her: A Novel by Marcie R. Rendon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.