Berkley
Published October 28, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Syd Walker, a Cherokee anthropologist employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has returned to her residence in Rhode Island after the traumatizing events she experienced back home in Oklahoma (recounted in Blood Sisters, 2023). She discovers a message on a work phone left behind by her retired boss that leads her to sneak over a wall to visit a possible grave site at an exclusive club where, apparently, native remains have been uncovered. The anthropologist who plans to excavate them may have been trained at Harvard, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing and doesn’t take seriously the ethical duties owed to the deceased woman’s people, the Narragansetts who still live in Rhode Island. Syd is appalled to learn that her boss was excavating native remains and artifacts at the club for decades without informing the tribe or the BIA. Before long, the bones that she has begun to help excavate disappear, as does a young woman from the tribe, a disappearance the authorities refuse to take seriously.