Book Review: Where They Last Saw Her

Quill has lived on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota her whole life. She knows what happens to women who look like her. Just a girl when Jimmy Sky jumped off the railway bridge and she ran for help, Quill realizes now that she’s never stopped running. As she trains for the Boston Marathon early one morning in the woods, she hears a scream. When she returns to search the area, all she finds are tire tracks and a single beaded earring.

Things are different now for Quill than when she was a lonely girl. Her friends Punk and Gaylyn are two women who don’t know what it means to quit; her loving husband, Crow, and their two beautiful children challenge her to be better every day. So when she hears a second woman has been stolen, she is determined to do something about it—starting with investigating the group of men working the pipeline construction just north of their homes.

As Quill closes in on the truth about the missing women, someone else disappears. In her quest to find justice for all of the women of the reservation, she is confronted with the hard truths of their home and the people who purport to serve them. When will she stop losing neighbors, friends, family? As Quill puts everything on the line to make a difference, the novel asks searing questions about bystander culture, the reverberations of even one act of crime, and the long-lasting trauma of being considered invisible.

Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie Rendon will be published September 3, 2024. Random House Publishing provided an early galley for review.

This is the fourth novel from Rendon and, having read them all, I see that she employs similar elements with this one as she has with her Cash Blackburn mystery series. Being a Native American, she writes about what she knows and does a fantastic job doing that. Her details about life for those on the reservations comes across clearly and honestly. It is a strength that she plays into for her novels.

Rendon also makes it a point to highlight the challenges that Native Americans face. This novel specifically focuses on the abduction of women and children from reservations. She feels it is important to shine a light on these problems and uses her writing to inform and to sound a call for action.

There are a couple things in her writing, though, that did not work for me as a reader.

First, she occasionally peppers dialogue with the Ojibwe language. While this very much adds to the realism of her work, it can be a source of confusion for the reader. Without some kind of translation, it puts the responsibility on the reader to find a way to translate things (if they decide to put in that effort at all). That takes time that pulls them out of the reading experience.

Second, her sentence structure tends to be less complex. It is often person-did-this, person-did-that. A lot of telling rather than showing. Again, it factors into the overall reading experience.

In both of these things, the mileage may vary depending upon the reader and their usual consumption sources.