"Trauma doesn't make you stronger," says Cash Blackbear in Marcie R. Rendon's remarkable "Sinister Graves," set in Minnesota in the 1970s. "You do that yourself." And Cash should know. She spent her childhood shunted from one white foster home to another, one beating to another, eventually coming out of the system at 18 into Mahnomen County, alone except for Sheriff Wheaton, who befriended her when she was a child and has remained her "only constant."
Now 19, Cash drinks too much, smokes too much, plays pool like a pro, and takes classes in criminal justice at the local community college. Cash is caught between a white world that doesn't see her and the Ojibwe world that she knows little about. But curiosity is one of Cash's defining characteristics — that, along with her prophetic sixth sense and uncanny ability in a deep trance to project herself from one place to another, making her invaluable to Wheaton's investigations.
In this novel, the third in Rendon's exceptional mystery series featuring Cash, the body of a young Ojibwe woman washes up after bad spring flooding in the Red River Valley. With a compassionate intensity, Cash digs into the woman's life. Eventually, the investigation leads Cash to a rural church where the murdered woman was last seen, the seductive pull of its handsome evangelical preacher, and two sinister graves.
