"Trauma doesn't make you stronger," says Cash Blackbear in Marcie R. Rendon's remarkable "Sinister Graves," set in Minnesota in the 1970s. "You do that yourself." And Cash should know. She spent her childhood shunted from one white foster home to another, one beating to another, eventually coming out of the system at 18 into Mahnomen County, alone except for Sheriff Wheaton, who befriended her when she was a child and has remained her "only constant."
Now 19, Cash drinks too much, smokes too much, plays pool like a pro, and takes classes in criminal justice at the local community college. Cash is caught between a white world that doesn't see her and the Ojibwe world that she knows little about. But curiosity is one of Cash's defining characteristics — that, along with her prophetic sixth sense and uncanny ability in a deep trance to project herself from one place to another, making her invaluable to Wheaton's investigations.
In this novel, the third in Rendon's exceptional mystery series featuring Cash, the body of a young Ojibwe woman washes up after bad spring flooding in the Red River Valley. With a compassionate intensity, Cash digs into the woman's life. Eventually, the investigation leads Cash to a rural church where the murdered woman was last seen, the seductive pull of its handsome evangelical preacher, and two sinister graves.
When Cash first visits the church, a shadowy apparition lopes from the corner of the yard toward her. Drunks didn't scare Cash, "mean white boys didn't scare her," but the darkness in the graveyard — that terrifies her. This malevolent figure creeps at the edges of the investigation, a haunting ancient presence, a jiibay, forcing Cash to reckon with more than she wants to, bringing new characters into the series that I think will take it to even more compelling places.
Like Cash's life, there's a rawness and a poetic leanness to Rendon's prose. The plot is quick with no excess, building to a confrontation that's inevitable and electrifying. Rendon's writing is quick and sharp and unflinching in its honesty. A member of the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation, Rendon uses stark language and presses issues that reflect the novel's time and place, including the violent persecution of and racism toward Native Americans and their children. Rendon's unswerving depiction of this landscape, this reality, is haunting and truly gripping.
Despite and because of her childhood trauma, there's a naiveté to Cash's character that stands along with her "need to set things right," no matter what the consequences. With her long single braid tucked in her back pocket, Cash is a kind of Don Quixote tilting her pool cue and curiosity until the truth is laid bare.
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"Sinister Graves"
By: Marcie R. Rendon.
Publisher: Soho Crime, 240 pages, $27.99.
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