Murder on the Red River

The first Cash Blackbear mystery introduces a fascinating character. Renee Blackbear, nicknamed Cash, is a Native American teen who was placed in the foster care system when her mother had a car accident while drunk. She's been moved from one farm family to another all around the Moorhead area. She began working - for Cash - when she was just eleven and emancipated herself from an especially nasty foster home at the age of thirteen with the help of the local sheriff who fills the role of guardian and mentor.

Cash's life consists of working on various farms, smoking, drinking beer, and shooting pool. Every once in a while, she gets a vision that helps Sheriff Wheaton solve a crime or two. This latest crime concerns the death of a Native show more man who had come down from the Leech Lake reservation to earn some cash to help his family through the winter. Her visions lead her to the reservation where she meets his wife and some of his seven kids. Snooping around in the local Fargo-Moorehead bars lets her overhear some guys talking about the guy's death. After another death, this time of a white guy, Cash overhears enough to point Sheriff Wheaton to the bad guys but not before they kidnap her and threaten to murder her.

This was a gritty sort of mystery filled with early 70s details including the pervasive prejudice against Native American and the systematic attempts to destroy Native culture. Cash is a victim of it as she spent a childhood separated from her family and in a succession of foster homes very often abusive.

I really liked Cash. She was resilient and very bright. But she was also a loner who doesn't form attachments to anyone but Sheriff Wheaton. Without him pushing her to do something with her life beyond farm work, she's content to just drift.

I can't wait to read more of Cash's adventures. show less

'Murder On The Red River' is vivid, realistic and beautifully written. It's a personal story of trauma and survival, disclosed around the investigation of a killing. The focus of the storytelling is not on the killing or even on finding the people who did the killing but on immersing the reader into the world of Renee "Cash" Blackbear, a nineteen-year-old Ojibwe woman making her living driving trucks for farmers in the Red River Valley in the 1970s.

We get to see the world as Cash sees it. We learn how she deals with the world and what she expects from it and, as she informally investigates the killing of an unidentified Native American man who was a long way from home, we learn about the childhood she had, being shifted from white show more foster home to white foster home and of the friendship she built with the local Sherriff, the only person who took any real interest in her welfare when she was a child.

The first thing we learn about Cash is that she's doing more than surviving. Her mind and her imagination are engaged with the world. We meet her as she walks into a local bar at the end of a long shift and her mind is as much on poetry as it is on the drinks she'll soon be winning as she dominates the pool table in the bar she thinks of as her evening home.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

"Sun-drenched wheat fields. The refrain ran through Cash's mind as she pulled open the Cashah's screen door. She stood still. Momentarily blinded, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkened barrio,. Outside, the sun rested on the western horizon Inside the Casbah it was always night. The wooden door thunked behind her. The bar smells- stale beer, cigarette smoke, sawdust and billiard chalk- welcomed her to her evening home.

Sun-drenched wheat fields, healing rays of god's love wash gently over me. Cash didn't like the word god. Even in her own mind it was written in lowercased letters. What had he ever done for her? Sun-drenched wheat fields, healing rays of sun's love... nah, didn't work. Healing rays of god's love- now thatworked."

I loved this storytelling style. It was immersive, visual and emotional. There is no separation between Cash and the story. The plot isn't just character-driven, the plot exists only as the trellis that the vine of Cash's personality blossoms on.

There is a plot and it's a good one. It shows not just how a native man from a long way away might come to be killed but how the people who did it might be fairly sure that they'd get away with it.

I liked that the killing and killers are treated as part of the landscape of Cash's world, as expected as a sunrise and as unsurprising as a familiar horizon. Cash throws her energy into solving the crime but not because she has a need to solve a puzzle or because she wants to be at the centre of the action but because this killing and these killers are part of her world and she can't let that pass.

Cash is tough but not callous. She's angry but she doesn't let that anger consume her. She does what she needs to do and she does it well. Yet she's aware that most of her life is still ahead of her and she's still thinking about what she should do with it, other than drive trucks, play pool and drink a lot of beer.

I was completely absorbed by this book. When it ended, it took a while for me to step back out of Cash's world and he way of seeing it.

'Murder On The Red River' was Marcie Rendon's debut novel. It was published in 2017, when she was sixty-five and already recognised as a playwright, a poet and a political activist. I think her maturity and her experience shine through in the novel. 'Murder On The Red River' is a remarkable book and a stunning debut novel.

I've already downloaded the second book in the series, 'Girl Gone Missing' (2019) and I'm looking forward to spending more time with Cash. show less

Well, here I go again, raving about a YA book! "but I don't like YA" I protest! It's just that some of them are awesome. The main character is endearing, but her life is fraught with disappointment and abuse. We meet her as a 19 year old living on her own, making a living driving farm trucks and shooting pool. I was totally drawn in by this character. Throughout the book, there are advocates through whose eyes you see Cash's hidden heart. The book is classified as a mystery, but that is only a backdrop for the character exploration. The author draws in the history of the indigenous peoples of North Dakota and Minnesota along with the racism they suffer as she leads the reader through the story. There's a bit of mysticism but it rings show more true and keeps the plot moving along. I so loved this character that I jumped right into #2 in the series just to keep her in my life. show less

Author, playwright, and poet Marcie R. Rendon's Murder on the Red River left me speechless at its power. This book should be required reading in our schools because of its authentic portrayal of Native American life. As hurt, as enraged, as I was while reading certain scenes, my emotions could in no way hold a candle to those of Native Americans who have actually lived through what is depicted in this book.

While important, the death of the man found in the field often takes a backseat to Cash's life story. She's survived a succession of foster homes, beginning work as a farm laborer at the age of eleven and getting her own apartment at the age of seventeen. Now nineteen, this five foot two woman with (as she tells us) black hair down to show more the bottom of her butt doesn't expect anything from life. If she doesn't need it, she doesn't buy it-- the cigarettes and beer she's smoked and drank since the age of eleven she considers necessities. She is very attuned to the land and nature because "the land had never hurt her or left her." She is a small, fierce bundle of rage, and as her story unfolds, readers understand why even though they may wish she could control herself better for her own safety. When she learns that there are seven orphans that will become a part of the foster care system, she rages, "You know, every one of these farmers is working our land. They got it for free. The government gave them our land for free... And now they'll have seven more farm laborers to work our land for them...for free." Cash doesn't want the same thing happening to those seven children that happened to her.

The legal kidnapping of Native children into the government foster care system is injustice at its finest (worst?), and through Cash, Rendon makes us feel every bit of it. Cash thinks about many things. Of working in the fields since the age of eleven. Of both her parents running away from government boarding schools. Of Native women fake speaking Spanish in order to be allowed into bars. It's 1970, and something called the American Indian Movement is beginning to be heard from, but Cash has also signed up for junior college. What's she going to do?

I can't wait to find out in the next book in this series, Girl Gone Missing. What a book! What a character! show less

I found this series debut to be less of a mystery than an exploration of Cash - an Ojibwe woman in the 1970s - and her experience of the racial tensions shaping her social landscape. Rendon wove these into every interaction so naturally; each character rang true. Wheaton’s heartfelt but hands-off brand of love, the fierce Day Dodge children taking care of each other, Cash’s world-worn, brittle exterior covering a soft, hurt teenager- you know these people, you feel them. Packaged in a writing style as gritty and brutalist as the story itself (a style which also recalls the tough-as-nails-ness of Gunsmoke or Dragnet narration), I would recommend this book to readers looking for a down-to-earth mystery tackling themes much larger than show more any one murder.
I wouldn't say I enjoyed this book, but I am glad I read it. The ending was compelling. 3/5 stars.

Trigger warnings: racism, hate crimes, alcoholism, murder, and foster abuse show less

Cash and Wheaton are great characters. Egregiously evil in Cash's life story of being removed from her home and family, and sent to many abusive and dysfunctional white foster homes. She wasn't fed enough, or loved. Punished harshly just for doing what all children do.

But now at 19 she has carved a life for herself by working for farmers and playing pool for money. She copes with way too much beer and cigarettes. Fortunately she has a mentor, Wheaton, the sheriff who has always looked out for her. She returns the favor when an Indian man is found stabbed in a local field, helping investigate because Wheaton doesn't have official authority in Indian matters.

Cash is independent, tough, resilient and caring.

Good read.

Cash Blackbear is a young agriculture worker living in Moorhead, Minnesota, just across the river from Fargo, North Dakota in the 1970s. She lives alone and is a solitary person, having lost her siblings in the foster system. She's Native, but doesn't have connections to the local tribes, but her one relationship is with the sheriff who kept an eye on her as she was moved from home to home, so the sheriff's office is as close a thing she has to a home. She's also tough and a pool shark, able to augment her seasonal farm work by taking advantage of the assumption that a girl, and a native girl at that, being any good. Then the Sheriff calls her in to help him out with a murdered body found on the riverbank. The FBI is involved, but show more Wheaton knows she'll have a better chance of talking to people the dead man knew back on the reservation. And so, Cash becomes involved, sometimes to a dangerous extent, in discovering what happened.

This is a standard first installment in a mystery series kind of book and while neither the writing or the mystery itself are anything out of the ordinary, the setting and the main character make this a more interesting book. Cash is an engaging character and she feels like a real person, and her experiences as a native kid stuck in the foster system are harrowing. So while I won't seek out more books in this series, I would read more by Rendon if asked to. show less