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.