Vanessa Lillie's protagonist, Syd Walker, is several things. She is a successful archaeologist working for the BIA's Rhode Island district. She is a wife to a successful doctor, Mal, who has just become pregnant and Syd is still unsure if she wants to be a parent. She is a "two-spirit" Cherokee (according to her beloved Aunt Mercy) who has escaped her small life in the even smaller, polluted town in northeastern Oklahoma, Picher. She is a survivor of a traumatic home invasion when she was a teenager; she managed to shoot one of the two men in devil's masks and escape with her sister, Emma Lou, but her best friend Luna and Luna's parents were murdered and both the killers and the Myers family burned up in their trailer. Syd hasn't been home in three years, since she went with her then new wife, to celebrate with her extended family, only to have to track down and rescue sister Emma Lou from a nearly fatal drug overdose.
Syd is called in by her supervisor and told to go to Oklahoma to identify a woman's skull that was found next to her family's property, with Syd's old BIA internship badge stuffed in its mouth. There she learns that sister Emma Lou has been missing for a week. She is determined to find her in spite of local BIA authorities' apparent stalling tactics. Her hot-headed nosiness quickly makes her a target of the huge and powerful Daweson family, two of whom were responsible for the murders of Luna and her family 15 years ago and who are now trying to build a new and improved drug trafficking operation. What Syd discovers will turn her world upside down.
This is a compelling thriller (and a bit of a ghost story) that kept me up into the wee hours of the morning. It is also a heartfelt exegesis of the centuries of mistreatment and broken promises by the U.S. government to the tribes of Native Americans who shepherded this continent for thousands of years prior to contact. The betrayals continue to this day as the the federal government largely ignores the disappearances and murders of Native American women. It is only recently that the numbers of Native American or Alaska Native women and girls have been tracked. Violence against women is under-reported. The rate of violence on Indian reservations is ten times that of the national aveerage. As recently as 2016, according to the National Crime Information Center, 5,712 missing indigenous women were reported, whereas, only116 made it into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
Reviews are uniformly positive. Library Journal concludes their review by saying, "The author ...combines Cherokee history and legend with contemporary drug and land problems in a gripping story of missing Indigenous women." Publishers Weekly notes, "Lillie does an excellent job of balancing a riveting plot with a moving portrait of her troubled lead." Booklist praises, "Lillie paints the beautiful yet bleak landscape with a fine brush. Readers who enjoy strong voices will be pulled in by the characters, while those who are drawn to setting will feel as if they are in Picher." The book is also recommended by The Washington Post; the Star Tribune, which raves ,"Just a few pages in and this novel is roaring with mystery, danger, anguish and regret. Lillie fuels her Native characters with hope, resentment, anger and despair... Blood Sisters lead[s] us on a path toward knowledge and discovery;" and the Los Angeles Book Review, "Blood Sisters is a book about family bonds and the lengths we will go to protect our own."
Even though this is fiction, I was reminded of Killers of the Flower Moon in terms of the dishonest and cruel treatment of Native Americans. Although the main character is flawed in ways that she and those close to her recognize, I did occasionally want to grab her by the shirt collar and quit going into dangerous situations on her own and usually unarmed. In many ways the book, storyline and protagonist all reminded me of the V.I. Warshawski books by Sara Paretsky, who hot headed and idealistic P.I. often ends up tackling much larger social issues in her efforts to solve a crime.
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