Review: ‘Blood Sisters’

Syd Walker is an archaeologist with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When a skull is discovered in Oklahoma with one of her old ID badges lodged in its mouth, she flies home to help identify the remains.

It’s a tantalizing plot point that effortlessly pulls us into this heartfelt story, with violence against Native American women at it center. Vanessa Lillie’s “Blood Sisters” aches with a pain that emanates from her personal experience and generational trauma.

When Lillie, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, was just out of high school, two local teenagers, Ashley Freeman and Lauria Bible, went missing. Several decades later they still haven’t been found. The epidemic of violence against Native women is gaining more attention, and as we learn in this book, people fighting for these too-long-ignored victims are part of what is now known as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit movement.

Syd, like Lillie, is Cherokee and when the novel begins, she’s living in Rhode Island, far from the trauma she suffered as a teenager 15 years earlier in northeast Oklahoma. Her best friend Luna was murdered, and Syd and her sister Emma Lou escaped a similar fate when Syd shot and killed one of the attackers.

Marinating in grief because she couldn’t save Luna, Syd left Oklahoma and moved east. She loves her wife but remains mired in past trauma. When we first meet her, the story slams us right into the grim reality of Syd’s work and her ongoing trauma. She’s examining the just-discovered remains of an unidentified woman found on Narragansett tribal lands. At the gravesite, she gets the call directing her to fly to Oklahoma. When she arrives, she’s told Emma Lou is missing.

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. Syd’s hunt for her sister, a recovering drug addict, is set against sobering backdrops: the drug epidemic in northeast Oklahoma, the mining that destroyed the land where Syd grew up and the toxic waste left behind by those who made a fortune off stolen land.

In Syd’s reckless and feverish search for her sister, she faces off against a family of drug dealers and makes a horrifying discovery connected to missing women.

A crime novel’s journey often runs toward escapism, but the best, like “Blood Sisters,” lead us on a path toward knowledge and discovery. As Lillie points out in her author’s note, “nearly 85% of American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime.”

Carol Memmott is a writer in Austin, Texas.

Blood Sisters

By: Vanessa Lillie.

Publisher: Berkley, 371 pages, $27.