Blood Relay

Choctaw historian Mihesuah (The Bone Picker) tracks the search for a missing Indigenous woman in this intense procedural. After competing in a traditional horse relay, Dels Billy disappears from the abandoned truck stop she pulls into when her vehicle gives out. Detective Perry Antelope of the Oklahoma City PD is determined to find Del at all costs, working with her partner Sophia Burns and members of the Seminole and Choctaw tribal police. As they analyze video recordings of the race and dig into Del’s family tensions, an anonymous attacker makes multiple attempts on Perry’s life. Mihesuah paints an optimistic picture of the cooperation required to solve the book’s “jurisdictional shit storm” of a crime, which crosses state and tribal nation lines, while also highlighting conflicts in Native communities that stem from the legacy of the land allotments doled out by the U.S. government in 1887. 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. Agent: Jacqueline Lipton, Tobias Literary. (Feb.)