Soho
Published March 4, 2025
Reviewed by Mary-Jane Oltarzewski
Broken Fields is the latest of Marcie Rendon’s smart, atmospheric novels to feature Renée “Cash” Blackbear, a full-time farm laborer, part-time college student, intermittent pool shark, and occasional consultant to local law enforcement. Cash is brilliant, perceptive, and troubled; she has “the ability to sense things other people couldn’t [and has] out-of-body traveled in a near dream state at times, gathering information about crimes that weren’t evident to others.” Some people call these gifts, but “Cash wasn’t sure … They seemed to come with the price of knowing too much about other people’s trouble and hurts.” She achieves a lot, despite the fact that she drinks way too much and is haunted by the events of her childhood. The local sheriff, Dave Wheaton, has kept an eye out for her since rescuing her from a car crash that killed her mother and separated her from her siblings when she was five years old, and he sometimes asks for her informal help in solving murders and locating missing persons.
This time, Cash happens upon a murder before Wheaton does, guided by a “familiar tingle” that tells her something is not quite right in a little house that’s adjacent to the field she is plowing. She pulls into the driveway in her employer’s tractor, and finds him brutally murdered inside. The dead man’s tenants, occupants of the house, are missing, but Shawnee, their young daughter, is cowering under a bed upstairs.
The action takes place in the Red River Valley region of Minnesota, during the 1970s, when foster care was an especially raw deal for Indigenous kids like Cash, who were deliberately separated from their extended families in order to “Whitewash” them, and then treated as cheap labor by the white farm families who took them in. Wheaton is trying to find Shawnee’s parents, the missing tenants, who look like suspects in the murder, but Cash’s primary concern is to protect the little girl from the same foster care system that stole her own childhood.
It’s a solid little murder mystery, but more intriguing than “whodunit,” is the evolving relationship between Cash, a loner who’s not much prone to conversation, and the child, who has been traumatized into muteness. In response to Shawnee’s plight, Cash becomes downright chatty, speaking gently, incessantly, about pretty much anything at all, in an effort to put her at ease. The latter is officially the responsibility of Miss Dackson, the same social worker who placed young Cash in a series of unpleasant foster “homes,” but Cash keeps checking in at all hours, and Wheaton doesn’t try very hard to stop her. His relationship with Cash, now that she has aged out of the system, is wholly unofficial, but they are bonded by the kind of respect – maybe even love – that damaged, decent people develop for their found families.
The circumstances surrounding the killings (the killer is actually responsible for more than one violent death, as well as an attempted murder that Cash manages to prevent) are, indeed, linked to a number of disturbing family secrets – the victim’s family, the suspects’ family, and a few other nice nuclear families who appear, on the surface, to be the backbone of the community. Although justice is served, to some extent, the most satisfying aspect of the bittersweet conclusion is the way in which Cash, Wheaton, and a few more of their unlikely, unofficial, brethren do their best to take care of one another in an unfair, dangerous world.
Read Sharon Mensing’s review of the audiobook version of this book.