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A Novel
by Devon Mihesuah
In this richly layered debut thriller reminiscent of the real issue of missing and murdered Indigenous people, a badass Choctaw detective discovers an insidious plot against her reservation while investigating the disappearance of a beloved champion athlete.
Choctaw Detective Perry Antelope has been with her partner, Sophia Burns, for only six months. Perry is a seasoned investigator while the ex-Olympian shot putter Sophia is a former street-smart police officer. Together, they are an intrepid pair with an established record of success. But when Perry and Sophia are called to investigate the disappearance of Dels Billy, a beloved women's Indian Horse Relay rider, they quickly realize that it's not as cut-and-dry as anything they've faced before.
Piece by piece, they uncover unsettling connections between Dels's disappearance and a series of unsolved abductions of women from Oklahoma reservations. But the perpetrator always seems to be one step ahead, and Perry soon finds herself—and her family—in the crosshairs of a ruthless killer. Despite her husband's pleas for her to drop the case, Perry is determined to prevent Dels from becoming another statistic.
As the investigation deepens, Perry and Sophia follow a tangled web of clues that point to a close-to-home plot more chilling than they could have imagined. Torn between her family's safety and her duty to her community, Perry must race against the clock, and across tribal Nations, to find Dels before her murderous abductor can carry out their sinister plan.
"Although the novel's prose can sometimes be workmanlike, the story, which makes extremely clever use of a misunderstanding, is a compelling and original one. Initially, events proceed at a fairly relaxed pace, accommodating Perry's musings—on her Comanche husband, on her garden, on her food preferences—but that changes when she has cause to demonstrate her physical might, at which point the mystery becomes a thriller and Perry someone not unlike an action hero. Solid story, fresh milieu, kick-ass protagonist." —Kirkus Reviews
"The author's depiction of Native life is full of distinctive personalities who will hold readers' attention, and her visceral fight scenes have a grittier, more lived-in edge than those in the average cop novel. The result is a satisfying, deeply felt, and uncomfortably relevant crime story." —Publishers Weekly
This information about Blood Relay was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Devon Mihesuah is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Cora Lee Beers Price Professor in the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas. A historian by training, she is a former editor of the American Indian Quarterly and the author of numerous award-winning nonfiction and fiction works about Native history and culture.
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