Murder on the Red River

An appealing 19-year-old heroine, Renee “Cash” Blackbear, lifts Rendon’s first mystery, set in Fargo, N.Dak., and—on the other side of the Red River—Moorhead, Minn. Sheriff Wheaton rescued Cash at age three in the aftermath of the accident in which her drunken mother rolled the family car containing Cash and her brother and sister. Lawfully separated from her family in what she considers a kidnapping, Cash grew up in a series of foster homes. Feisty, sensitive, and smart, Cash is now a farm laborer and a pool shark, and her only real friend is Wheaton. When she hears a radio announcer say one morning that Wheaton has found a body in a field on the Minnesota side of the river, she drives to the crime scene. There Wheaton enlists her aid in investigating the stabbing death of Day Dodge, a native worker from the Red Lake Reservation. Mystery readers should know that Rendon, the author of Pow Wow Summer and other children’s books, focuses more on the abuses Native Americans suffer than on the efforts to solve Dodge’s brutal murder. (Mar.)