BLOOD RELAY

A Choctaw horse relay rider goes missing in the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.

Oklahoma City homicide detective Perry Antelope and her partner, Sophia Burns, arrive on the scene after they receive word of a young woman’s abduction from an abandoned rest stop. Both the missing woman, Delphine Adele “Dels” Billy, who isn’t answering her phone, and the teenage boy she was riding with, who’s now lying unconscious in the grass nearby, are Choctaw, like Perry. According to Dels’ team, she had set off for home after winning an Indian horse relay race, which consists of a rider switching horses twice while doing laps around a half-mile track. When her team drove by the rest stop, they spotted her truck and trailer, stopped, and found the vehicle empty. There doesn’t seem to be a monetary motive for kidnapping Dels; as her boyfriend puts it, “This isn’t the Kentucky Derby.” Of course, Perry is well aware, but doesn’t say, that “snatching women often had nothing to do with money.” While Dels’ abduction occurred in the Seminole Nation—that is, out of the Oklahoma City Police Department’s jurisdiction—a tribal officer invites Perry and her partner to join the search. Mihesuah is Choctaw and a historian, and readers will sometimes be able to hear the author in Perry’s more expansive thoughts and comments—about the Indian horse relay tradition, about the history of U.S. government allotments to Native people. 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.