Review by Deborah Locke
Marcie Rendon did it again. She wrote a book that kept me awake and reading well past a reasonable bedtime, with an intense story that starts with a woman’s scream at night in winter on a reservation.
That scream introduced readers to the increasingly frustrating topic of missing and murdered indigenous women, and the unrelenting efforts of one Indian woman to find the missing. Like Rendon’s previous crime novels, this one, “Where They Last Saw Her” (Bantam, $18) introduces believable characters in a familiar northern Minnesota landscape, characters alarmed enough by the disappearance of women to take matters into their own hands. The protagonist, Quill, is dogged in her investigation that links the women’s disappearance to oil pipeline “man camps.”
The book is fiction, but the disappearance of American Indian women and children is real. The FBI National Crime Information Center reported 5,203 missing Indigenous girls and women in 2021, disappearing at a rate equal to more than two and a half times their share of the population.
Rendon’s book describes the perfect storm that brings out-of-state men to northern Minnesota to work temporary pipeline jobs. Before long, Indian women go missing, and no one appears to notice. Rendon’s fictional characters notice, triggering an engaging plot that twists unexpectedly while delivering the kind of details that make you feel that you know these people.
By Marcie R. Rendon
Bantam publishing
September 2024
The character we know the best, Quill, is an avid runner on the Red Pine Reservation near Duluth who when young, witnessed the suicide of a boy, ran for help, and has been running in different ways ever since. She has a good home life with a loving, supportive husband, Crow, and two adorable children. Their snug home is in a village where neighbors keep an eye on each other. All leave their doors unlocked. Quill is training for the Boston Marathon and is seen sprinting through the village and down the reservation trails daily, day and night.
She was into her afternoon run in the woods when she heard the woman scream. Fearful for her life, Quill raced to her car and then home where Crow assured Quill that they would return to the woods the next morning and look around. They find signs of a struggle in the snow, Quill finds and pockets an earring, and through her own investigation, learns the name of the woman who had disappeared. Before long, two women are abducted from the local casino; now three women are missing. Outraged women from the Red Pine Reservation village brought attention to the missing women. They quickly organized a march in Duluth to address abducted, trafficked and murdered Indian women who were last seen at the Duluth Harbor. Rendon wrote:
“…they would march to the shipping harbor, where large international ships passed through the canal. It was known that numerous Native women, for as long as ships had passed through the shipyard, had disappeared on ships that moved through the harbor, never again seen by their families.”
She also described the impact of an influx of pipeline employees on small communities with limited law enforcement and social services. “They came without family. Without the civilizing presence and responsibility of spouses or children. They bunked in makeshift man camps or filled the local motels…Making mega-man wages, they spent big and drank heavily. They had spare cash to spend on illicit drugs.”
The Natives weren’t the only people who noticed the interloping pipeline workers. Rendon wrote: “A quiet folk, the locals tended to keep their personal business to themselves. They didn’t talk to their neighbors about a daughter who arrived back home with the sun coming up, her clothes in tatters, her eyes blank and her speech slurred.”
A skilled writer can work truth into fiction in a way that changes the way people think. With bite, Rendon shines a bright light on a horrifying, intolerable trend that should be shouted from every high point in the country. Yes, this is happening –an unspeakable violence and cruelty based on misogyny, racism and the objectification of Indian girls and women.
A final thought. The book cover is creepy. That’s by design. It’s exactly what the families of beaten or dead Indian women see in hospital beds or at the morgue.
