Author Talk with Native American Author Marcie Rendon's "Sinister Graves" (Virtual)

Set in 1970s Minnesota on the White Earth Reservation, Pinckley Prize–winner Marcie R. Rendon’s gripping new mystery Sinister Graves follows Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman, as she attempts to discover the truth about the disappearances of Native girls and their newborns.

A snowmelt has sent floodwaters down to the fields of the Red River Valley, dragging the body of an unidentified Native woman into the town of Ada. The only evidence the medical examiner recovers is a torn piece of paper inside her bra: a hymnal written in English and Ojibwe.

Cash Blackbear, a 19-year-old Ojibwe woman, sometimes helps her guardian Sheriff Wheaton on his investigations. Now she knows her search for justice for this anonymous victim will take her to the White Earth Reservation, a place she once called home.

When Cash happens upon two small graves in the yard of a rural, “speak-in-tongues kinda church,” Cash is pulled into the lives of the malevolent pastor and his troubled wife while yet another Native woman dies in a mysterious manner.

Marcie Rendon is a Native American playwright, poet, author, and community arts activist based in Minneapolis. She is an enrolled member of the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.

Rendon founded Raving Native Productions theater. Along with various plays, screenplays, poems, and short stories, she has written two nonfiction books for children, and three crime fiction novels. Her first novel Murder on the Red River won the 2018 Pinckley Prize for Debut Crime Fiction. Her second novel Girl Gone Missing was shortlisted for an Edgar Award in January 2020 (The G.P. Putnam's Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award). Her most successful theatre work to date is "Free Frybread Telethon", a play that satirizes the American prison system and its treatment of Native Americans. Sinister Graves was a Minnesota Book Award Finalist.