Broken Fields

Starred review from January 1, 2025

It's spring in Minnesota's Red River Valley, and Cash Blackbear is making extra money plowing fields. When she notices a car running all day in front of a farmhouse, something feels off, so she enters the home, where she finds its owner, Bud Borgerud, shot to death in the kitchen. Bud's tenants, an Indigenous field worker and his wife, aren't there, but Cash finds their daughter Shawnee hiding under a bed and informs Wheaton, the county sheriff. Her primary concern is for Shawnee, who seems to be in shock and isn't speaking; the child may have witnessed the shooting. Borgerud's widow asks to take in Shawnee, but Cash's psychic gift tells her to be suspicious of the woman. Instead, she hopes to find Shawnee's mother before the child is moved to the foster system that Cash barely survived. When another body turns up, Cash gets involved in the murder investigation while searching the White Earth Reservation for the missing mother and trying to keep secrets from Sheriff Wheaton. VERDICT The author of Where They Last Saw Her brings back Cash Blackbear (who last appeared in 2022's Sinister Graves) in a tragic, unforgiving crime novel that emphasizes the perils of the foster care system for Indigenous children.--Lesa Holstine

Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 6, 2025
Rendon’s fourth outing for Ojibwe sleuth Cash Blackbear (after Sinister Graves) combines a shocking whodunit with an insightful exploration of guilt. In the previous book, Cash killed a man in self-defense. At the outset of this one, she remains unsettled by the tragedy, viewing it as a referendum on the survival instincts she cultivated during her tumultuous childhood in foster care. In the months since the incident, Cash has been hired by Minnesota farmer Bud Borgerud to help tend his land. One afternoon, she finds Borgerud dead on the farmhouse floor, his body riddled with gunshot wounds. The rest of the property is empty, save for Shawnee, the daughter of Nils and Arlis Petterson, who were renting the farmhouse from Boregerud. Shawnee is shaken and unable—or unwilling—to say what she knows about Borgerud’s death, so Cash sets out to solve the murder and locate the young girl’s parents before she’s sent into foster care. The investigation points Cash toward Borgerud’s wife, though she lacks solid proof—and then more bodies start piling up. Rendon excels at balancing plot and character, taking time to probe Cash’s psychology while orchestrating a deliciously complicated mystery for her to solve. Readers will be rapt. Agent: Jacqui Lipton, Tobias Literary.

January 15, 2025
Peyton Place meetsFargo in this clipped tale of misdoings in the Red River Valley. As she's plowing a field on Bud Borgerud's farm one morning, Cash Blackbear spots a car parked with its engine running outside a house Borgerud's renting to Nils and Arlis Petterson. The car is still there and still running the next time Cash passes, and the time after that. So Cash, an Ojibwe woman with a troubled past and a sixth sense that tells her things other people miss, pulls over and checks out the car, which is empty, and the house, which is occupied by a little girl and a dead body. The terrified girl speaks only enough to identify herself as Shawnee, but Cash recognizes the corpse as that of Bud Borgerud. Although Norman County Sheriff David Wheaton, the mentor who's already gotten Cash out of more than one dangerous situation, assumes that Arlis Petterson shot her landlord and ran off with her husband, Cash can't imagine why Arlis would abandon a child Cash believes is her daughter, a child who's now unhappily shifted first to a county social worker's custody, then to newly widowed Jean Borgerud's. And the balance of authority shifts from Wheaton to Cash when she rescues him from the trunk of his car, where he's been locked by a trio of bank robbers who got the drop on him. Rendon is less interested in spinning out further complications--most readers will spot Borgerud's killer early on--than in exploring the ways the deck is stacked against Cash because she's a woman, an Ojibwe, and a maverick with limited respect for white men's rules. A telling epitaph for the dreams of a heroine who had "dared to hope for something else this time."

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2025
Rendon, an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation of north-central Minnesota, writes about the challenges of being Ojibwe American in her riveting Cash Blackbear series, set in the Red River Valley in the 1970s. Cash is a young woman farm laborer and occasional sleuth for the county sheriff, who has helped her ever since she was tossed from a car as an infant. In this, the fourth in the series, Cash is plowing a field when she notices that a car has been running in front of the farmhouse for hours. She finds a dead man on the kitchen floor, and a little girl hiding under a bed upstairs. At the sheriff's urging, Cash investigates, encountering obstacles like the trauma-induced mutism of the little girl and the disappearance of the girl's parents. Then another body is found, and the sheriff himself goes missing. Rendon delivers lots of suspense; a resourceful, rural community-smart heroine in Cash; and wrenching insights into the overt and covert racism endured by Indigenous people. An outstanding contribution to the growing mystery genre starring Indigenous American women sleuths.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.