Where They Last Saw Her: A Novel

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the award-winning author of the Cash Blackbear series comes a compelling novel of a Native American woman who learns of the disappearance of one of her own and decides enough is enough.

A WASHINGTON POST AND BOOK RIOT BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

All they heard was her scream.

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.

Marcie R. Rendon, citizen of the White Earth Nation, is one of O: The Oprah Magazine’s 31 Native American Authors to Read Right Now and a McKnight Distinguished Artist Award winner. Her debut novel, Murder on the Red River, received the Pinckley Prize for Debut Novel Award and was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award, Contemporary Novel category, and her second novel, Girl Gone Missing, was nominated for the G. P. Putnam’s Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award. Her script, Say Their Names, will be produced by Out of Hand Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. And her script Sweet Revenge had a staged reading at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The creative mind of Raving Native Theater, she curated Twin Cities Public Television’s Art Is . . . CreativeNativeResilience. Rendon received the Loft Literary Center’s Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship with co-creator Diego Vazquez for their work with incarcerated women.