Soho
Published March 2025
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet
Minneapolis-based author Marcie R. Rendon was an accomplished poet and playwright long before she began writing her Cash Blackbear series of mysteries. An enrolled member of the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa, her work painstakingly documents the struggles of Native Americans, especially women and girls, in the modern Great Plains communities. With Cash, however, she reaches a massive reading public. In the first of Cash’s adventures, we are introduced to the heroine as a teenage girl, a cynical graduate of a series of mostly abusive white foster homes, smoking, drinking at the dive bar the Casbah, and trying to survive. Her skills of ratiocination, helped by her dreamlike visions, interest her one decent guardian, Sheriff Dave Wheaton. While totally not being a white savior stereotype, Wheaton enlists Cash to help him solve crimes. He needs to: he can’t really function without her. As the series continues, Cash’s investigative victories pile up but she doesn’t really gain power in her limited post-colonial farmtown world. The series is riveting while never promising the reader–or Cash herself–more than reality can deliver.
The lastest installment, Broken Fields, is no exception. At its start, Cash is back from her attempt to go to college and working in a job she enjoys: driving farm equipment for a local white farmer. Many farmers don’t want to hire Indigenous women, but she has proven herself to this one. Seeing a strange truck, she walks into her employer’s house and finds him dead on the kitchen floor. Upstairs is a five-year-old Indigenous girl, Shawnee, who seems to have witnessed everything, but will not talk. The victim’s widow resists Cash and Wheaton’s attempts to investigate while providing Shawnee, whom she has legally got custody of, with questionable care. The local social worker, the judgmental, virtue-signaling Miss Dackson, is mainly an obstacle–and not just to the murder investigation. “You think you’re slick,” Cash tells her, “when you get the kids as far away as possible from the parents… you know they always try to find their kids.”
By investigating the murder–and other crimes revealed gradually–Cash also investigates how the legal system treats Indigenous children and their parents. Her own experience as an Indigenous foster child fuels her drive to procure justice and safety for Shawnee and her family. Though the action takes place in the late 1970s, it is uncertain whether anything has improved. And at a pivotal point, Cash, former ward of a county sheriff, must decide if the pursuit of justice and child safety allows or even requires her to break the law herself.
Rendon’s usual incisively realist yet epic depiction of life in rural Minnesota is evident here in Broken Fields as in her previous novels. The fields are broken up by the farmers and their workers, such as Cash, but it is also the systems that are supposed to support them that are broken.
See also Mary-Jane Oltarzewski’s review of the print version of this book and Sharon Mensing’s review of the audiobook version.