Marcie R. Rendon’s Girl Gone Missing, the second Cash Blackbear mystery, is a strong followup to Murder on the Red River. Only a member of a Native American nation, as the author is, could tell such an authentic story of a brooding, displaced young woman.

Although she’s most comfortable drinking and playing pool in her favorite bar in Fargo, North Dakota, Renee “Cash” Blackbear is enrolled in college at Moorhead State in Minnesota, thanks to Sheriff Wheaton. He’s taken an interest in the nineteen-year-old ever since he pulled her from a car accident when she was three.

Now, Cash has aged out of the system, escaped foster homes and abuse. She’s called Cash because she works for cash, and pays cash. She’s a loner at school, one of a handful of Indians enrolled there in the late 1960s. Before she even learns about a girl’s disappearance from school, Cash dreams about a blonde girl calling for help. Then she hears the stories of Janet Tweed’s disappearance. Cash’s dreams change to include two blondes when another girl disappears. Neither young woman is the type to run away. They’re good students with families and small communities that are proud of them.

Because of her dreams, Cash asks questions at school and at work, but it isn’t until she makes her first trip to the “Cities”, Minneapolis and St. Paul, that she herself is pulled into the room where the lost girls are kept.

Rendon looks back at a tragic period in American history. She juggles white slavery, Vietnam, the American Indian Movement, and young Native Americans lost to their families. Girl Gone Missing offers a strong sense of place and historical atmosphere. It’s a bittersweet, melancholy mystery with an unusual amateur sleuth.

Marcie R. Rendon’s website is http://www.marcierendon.com/

Girl Gone Missing by Marcie R. Rendon. Cinco Punto Press, 2019. ISBN 9781947627116 (paperback), 208p.

*****
FTC Full Disclosure – I received a copy of the book to review for a journal.