Fans of Native American storyteller Marcie R Rendon’s wonderful Cash Blackbear mysteries have been pining since 2022 for a new novel starring the young Ojibwe farm worker, college student, and occasional sleuth. The wait was worth it: Broken Fields is a terrific fourth outing in Cash’s escapades in the Red River Valley during the 1970s.

Cash is doing Spring fieldwork for a Minnesota farmer when she discovers him dead on the kitchen floor of a rented farmhouse. A young Native girl, Shawnee, is hiding under her bed, terrified. Shaken by events in the previous book, Sinister Graves, Cash questions her intuition, while feeling long-held anger and resentments flare when Shawnee is put into foster care, then with the grieving widow, a ‘good Christian woman’. Triggering for Cash, given her experiences being near-slave labour for white families as an indigenous foster child. While Cash and Sheriff Wheaton search for Shawnee’s parents, another body turns up, and rumours swirl of ‘Peyton Place’ style scandals among their community.

Rendon, a poet and playwright, and member of the White Earth Anishinabe Nation, crafts another immersive mystery that vividly evokes time, place, and historic attitudes. Cash is a fantastic heroine; complex, fascinating, and authentic as she deals with PTSD and ongoing prejudices. Rendon’s light touch means despite the dark acts and traumas Broken Fields never reads as too bleak. A terrific novel in a terrific series.

[This review was first written for publication in Good Reading magazine, in Australia]

Broken Fields is the fourth book in Marcie R Rendon’s character-driven series featuring Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibway woman in 1970s Minnesota. With a plot involving a murdered farmer and an abandoned child, Broken Fields will draw you in and by the time you finish the book you may also have a greater understanding of the challenges faced by indigenous children in the foster care system of the day.

The story is told from Cash’s perspective, and she’s a woman who sees beauty in the rich agricultural land of the Red River Valley. Both a bright college student and a hardworking farm labourer, Cash is still struggling with the trauma that occurred in Sinister Graves, so getting back to plowing fields appeals to her. When not working, she likes to supplement her income shooting pool. Occasionally, Cash will informally assist Sherriff Wheaton with police issues that happen in the rural community.

Her relationship with Wheaton is at the heart of this novel. They have a connection going back years. When her inebriated mother drove the family car into a ditch, he rescued the family from the overturned vehicle, but Cash’s mother did not survive the accident. No effort was made to keep the siblings together, so Cash had a challenging childhood moving from one foster home to another. She was often treated badly by foster parents who saw her as free labour. Wheaton did what he could to make her life more bearable. When she hit her late teens, he found her an apartment in Fargo, North Dakota.

The book opens with Cash plowing a field for Bud Borgerud. While working, she notices a car sat running outside Bud’s house. It piques her curiosity so she goes to the house, knocks and when nobody answers she enters the house where she discovers a dead man lying on the kitchen floor. Later she realises that the corpse is her current boss, Bud.

Cash senses that there is somebody else in the house and discovers a terrified young girl hiding under one of the beds upstairs. The child is traumatised by whatever events led to Bud’s murder. All that Cash can get from the little girl is that her name is Shawnee. She notifies Wheaton and tries to calm the child who is reluctant to leave the safety of her hiding spot. Cash wonders what happened to the girl’s parents.
This case hits home for Cash. She sees herself in the five-year-old girl, Shawnee. All of those old feelings of abandonment and fear come back especially when she must leave Shawnee in the care of the same social worker who placed her in unsatisfactory foster homes. Her concerns increase when she discovers that the social worker has placed the girl with Bud’s widow.

While Wheaton is dealing with a bank robbery, Cash begins to search for Shawnee’s mother and believes she’s had a vision of the woman. Cash is more in touch with her visions now than she was in the previous books. Her friend Jonesy, an elder who also has visions, is guiding Cash to trust and accept her intuition.

There is much to admire in Cash. In spite of a less than ideal childhood, she is resilient. She is gradually building connections with those who look out for her. Characters from the previous books in the series, like Al make appearances in Broken Fields. There are definite moments of tension for Cash in the book however it is intermittent. You will be invested in the character in a novel which is as much about her dealing with her past as it is an intriguing murder mystery.

I received a copy for review purposes. All opinions are honest and mine alone.


BROKEN FIELDS, by Marcie R. Rendon, is 4th in an ongoing series and easily read as a standalone. Rendon provides enough background for readers to understand what happened to lead character, Cash.

Cash is a complex, young indigenous woman who harbors an intense amount of anger, resentment and pain resulting from her life spent in the foster care system. The story takes place in the late 1970’s, (her having grown up in the 60’s-70’s) when Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in “Christian” homes, many of them under horrendous, abusive conditions.

Shawnee is a 4 or 5 year old little girl who witnessed the death of her parent’s employer. Her parents are missing; folks assume they’re guilty - they’re Indians. Cash, after discovering the dead farmer whom she worked for, also found this little girl, shivering under a bed, too scared to speak. She brings her to town, to her good friend, Wheaton, the sheriff.
He transfers Shawnee to the county social worker’s care, the same woman who was responsible for Cash as a child. At this point, the rehashing and comparing of two storylines is prominent.

Also in abundance throughout the book are descriptions of, well, almost everything other than people and how they feel. Cash has a gift of intuition that helps her investigate for Wheaton. She sometimes dreams, gets a shiver or an out of body vision. This aspect is not well developed in her character, she’s not all together comfortable with it which makes it feel less contrived. I wouldn’t say it’s at a magical realism level. I wanted to know more about how Cash and Wheaton felt during many scenes.

There were stretches of time I found the prose to be frustrating. Rendon writes with lots of short, simple sentences and is repetitive to the point of frustration. She has some kind of preoccupation with saying the model of car Cash drives: Ranchero. Good grief, it must be stated over 100 times! In addition, there are many, many non sentences. It’s possible these will be edited, as I’m reading an eARC, but I suspect they are a stylistic choice. It’s one I find that when used for effect, it can be successful but in this case, it makes for choppy passages.

It was interesting to learn some unique Midwest words and usage, (ope, the tamarak, 3.2 beer), after researching them myself. Perhaps earlier books gave definitions but this one didn’t. Still, I enjoy learning new things. That’s not the case with political and social issues in this story. There are some mentions, mostly by Cash and her experiences that are now being compared to Shawnee’s, but there are no long diatribes or significant amounts of historical information detailed.

Violence and sexual content are at a PG-13 level without detailed descriptions. Language is R rated with a full complement of expletives, including f-bombs.

Recommended for those who like period fiction, domestic mysteries, small town stories with a limited cast of characters and series fiction that offers complete stories in a single volume📚

Cash Blackbear is a young Ojibwe woman I've come to care about deeply in this series (of now) four books. Broken Fields is a tapestry tightly woven with details of Native American life in northern Minnesota, abusive farm labor practices, and women's liberation.

Rendon's depiction of the landscape and farming aspects takes me right back to my childhood in a small farm town in central Illinois. Sights, sounds, smells-- Rendon's descriptions are incredibly vivid.

Equally vivid are her characters. There's Sheriff Wheaton, the great rescuer, who keeps a close eye on Cash and is doing his best to further her education and work experience. No one wants to see Cash succeed more than he does. But no character shines more brightly than Cash, battle-scarred survivor of the harsh foster system. Her fierce protectiveness of little Shawnee shows how deeply she cares-- and sometimes she cares so deeply that her anger takes control of her actions. After what happened in the previous book (Sinister Graves), Cash doesn't trust her intuition the way she used to. She sleeps with the lights on. She drinks too much. It's been a long time since I've been so invested in a character. I want this young woman to succeed. I want her to thrive.

And I want this series to continue for a good long time. If you like good mysteries with a strong main character, a superb sense of place, and a writing style that draws you right into the heart of each book, you have to make the acquaintance of Cash Blackbear. Start with the first book, Murder on the Red River. You can thank me later.

This novel really tore at my soul. Part of the interweaving tales involve a small girl left behind after witnessing a murder who ends up in a less than healthy foster home. In some ways reflecting Cash's past, we watch it tear her apart as she searches for the little girl's parents. Her many self-destructive behaviors come into focus and we get a feel for how they've taken control of her. Here is a young woman who is so bright, so capable, and so very flawed. I'm really hoping that Wheaton and Jonesy can pull her through.

I've now spent my February in the Red River Valley in Minnesota with Cash Blackbear and I must confirmed that I've enjoyed my time with her. I've read all the books up till now and I've enjoyed them.

Let's just say that Cash is complicated. I've now been with her for some time, seeing her grow, her whys and wherefores though the series up to now. Rendon takes the opportunity to show how each incident even the smallest effects Cash and how she is working through her grief and trauma. Grief and trauma are a filter through which we see the world and our lives and effect our lives accordingly.

Rendon through her stories explores how the violence, trauma done to her people has a generational effect. It does not stop with the actual victims but it’s visited on their children. The children inherit the effects of the trauma, the bad decisions taken because of the trauma and coping with it have a direct effect on them. Their own reactions and possible bad decisions then effect their own children and so on and so forth. What seems of little importance to people who are not traumatised or downtrodden can have a big effect to those thus effected.

Broken Fences is the 4th in the series. Although you’ll probably do just fine reading them as standalones, you’d miss the Cash’s personal arc which I’m very interested in.

An ARC kindly given by author/publisher via Netgalley.

Minnesota, 1970s: It’s spring in the Red River Valley and Cash Blackbear is doing fieldwork for a local farmer—until she finds him dead on the kitchen floor of the property’s rented farmhouse. The tenant, a Native field laborer, and his wife are nowhere to be found, but Cash discovers their young daughter, Shawnee, cowering under a bed. The girl, a possible witness to the killing, is too terrified to speak.

In the wake of the murder, Cash can’t deny her intuitive abilities: she is suspicious of the farmer’s grieving widow, who offers to take in Shawnee temporarily. While Cash is scouring White Earth Reservation for Shawnee’s missing mother—whom Cash wants to find before the girl is put in the foster system—another body turns up. Concerned by the escalating threat, Cash races against the clock to figure out the truth of what happened in the farmhouse.

I really enjoyed this! Cash is one of the most compelling characters I've read in a long time. This is a time and place I haven't read much about, and it was interesting from that perspective as well. The story was solid and kept me engaged from the beginning, and the characters are excellent and relatable in their own ways. 5⭐

I received an advanced complimentary digital copy of this book from Netgalley. Opinions expressed are my own.

This book was phenomenal. Rendon wrote authentic characters, a compelling suspenseful plot line, and a heart wrenching story that more people need to read, learn, understand, and care about. The #MMIW focus of this story really made me want to do more research on the topic and learn more. I cried thinking about what the characters of this novel were going through. I’ll be recommending this book for years. It was un-putdownable.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy of Broken Fields by Marcie Rendon.

I have very much enjoyed the Cash Blackbear series, and this was another solid entry. While parts of the book felt repetitive, I really enjoy Cash's character development and how her past influences the decisions she make. I always love a mystery where there's a fine line between good and evil and where sometimes you have to do the wrong thing to make things right.

I’m a huge fan of Marcie Rendon’s books. I enjoyed her stand alone novel but was super excited to see a new Cash Blackbeard story.

Cash’s struggle with her place in the world is as large a piece of the story as the mystery is. The mystery is good, with some new side characters, engagement with prior book characters but just enough to move the story forward. I look forward to seeing what happens to Cash next.

I received an e-arc from NetGalley and the publisher to review.

I don’t often read novels set in the US Southwest, and am embarrassed to admit this is one of the first books I’ve read with a Native American female protagonist. That said, I find main character Cash Blackbear to be so compelling.
In this novel, set in the 1970’s, Cash uses her gift for dreaming or telepathically sensing/seeing people she is trying to help. She unofficially helps a local cop solve crimes; he, having kept a protective eye over her since she was a young child put into the foster care system, serves in turn as a mentor to Cash.
I can’t help but root for this independent and self-sufficient woman. I excited to go back and read the previous books in this series.
Thanks to NetGalley, SoHo Press and author Marcie R. Rendon for providing this ARC in return for my honest review.

Broken Fields (Cash Blackbear Mystery Book 4) is set in and around Minnesota and North Dakota. Cash has aged out of foster care and does field work for the local farms. She is a beer drinking, chain smoking, pool player who often ends up in bed with local men. Nonetheless, Cash has a knack for solving local crimes and assists Wheaton, the county sheriff, in solving them. Broken Fields is about Cash finding a scared five-year-old girl and a dead body in a farm house. The best line of the novel is when Cash, who is skeptical that the good Christian woman may be responsible for her husband's death an says: "Never know what these church ladies are capable of." The novel can be read as a stand-alone, but readers who like Cash and all her quirks will want to begin with book one. Readers may also need to establish themselves with the cadence of the writing. At first, the sentences seem choppy and there are some incomplete sentences, too, but once readers understand Cash's personality, the novel moves along quickly.

Every book in this series is amazing, but I think this might be the best one yet. Cash Blackbear is a flawed protagonist, yet she’s so easy to root for. I love the complexity of her as a character. The mystery in this book is fairly straightforward, though the addition of a child named Shawnee, who may have been a witness to the crime, gave an added sense of urgency to the story, while at the same time forcing Cash to confront her own traumatic past. The author addresses several difficult topics: the foster care system, the overall treatment of Native Americans in the U.S., misogyny and racism (particularly in rural communities), individual traumas. It would be easy for the book to become depressingly bleak, but it never tips too far in that direction. Cash’s relationship with Wheaton, who is a sort of father figure for her, is, in turns, entertaining and emotionally satisfying. I loved seeing some of Cash’s old friends pop up in this book, and you never know when she’ll make an unexpected new friend or ally, too. Highly recommend this one!

This was a strong fourth entry in the Cash Blackbear Mystery series, it had that element that I was looking for and enjoyed the overall feel of this book. It continued the story perfectly and was hooked from the first page. Marcie R. Rendon has a strong writing style and enjoyed the way the characters worked in this. I'm excited to read more in this series and from Marcie R. Rendon.

I’m a big Marcie Rendon fan and this 4th installment of the Cash Blackbear series was okay, but not fabulous. Fans of the series and/or author will most likely enjoy, but no need to rush to get to it.

I'm a fan of the Cash BlackBear Mystery series so I was thrilled to read Marcie R. Rendon's newest edition. Cash BlackBear is an Ojibwe girl who lives in the Red River Valley and is a trusted sheriff's helper due to her amazing intuition. The case pulled me in immediately when Cash finds a child hiding under a bed and a murdered farmer left behind. The story is engaging, and provides a window to some of the darkness of American Indian life..Thanks to NetGalley and publisher for the ARC. Pub Date: March 4, 2025.

#BrokenFields

Full disclosure: I love this series. Set in the 1970s, it focuses on an Ojibwe girl living in the Red River valley, where she has been mentored by a sheriff who has grown somewhat dependent on her help with cases, partly because she has a gift for gaining information from the dead. It's not a gift she has always welcomed, but after the events of the previous book in the series, she's finding it has mostly abandoned her, which leaves her somewhat bereft. In this case, while plowing a field she noticed a car idling for hours outside a house used by tenants of a local farmer. She eventually goes to check it out and finds a child hiding under a bed upstairs, and the farmer dead of a gunshot wound. The obvious suspects are the girl's parents who have vanished, but that doesn't make sense to Cash Blackbear who knows something else is going on. And then another body is found...

I like the main character and the laconic language of these stories, but what I tend to remember most is the author's descriptions of a land that, to most outsiders, is just boring, flat fields. She really brings it to life and makes its beauty and the connection Cash feels to it visible.

As a fan of the Cash Blackbear series, I was so excited when I saw that there was another one coming in 2025 and knew I had to read it. When Cash finds a farmer dead in his rental farmhouse and the renters, a young Native couple, gone without a trace, she is pulled into another case with Wheaton. This case hits closer to home for Cash, as the couple left behind a young daughter, Shawnee, who Cash is determined to reunite with her parents to avoid foster care and a similar path that she had growing up. She follows her intuition and is able to find answers for every question that is raised and ultimately solve the murder. I like that the smaller storylines that exist throughout the book do not take away from the main one and don’t feel too random, but connected with other characters or storylines from previous books. While you don’t need to read the other books, which I appreciate, you definitely get a better sense of who Cash is as a person, as well as the setting and other characters, by doing so. I have grown to love Cash over throughout the series, and feel a sense of familiarity and comfort with her, and love her relationship with Wheaton. I will always reach for more Cash Blackbear mysteries!

Marcie R. Rendon, author of the powerful novel Where They Last Saw Her, brings back her series character, Cash Blackbear, in a another traumatic, thought-provoking mystery, Broken Fields. This time, it’s Cash and a young Native girl who suffer through current issues, and memories of the past.

It’s spring in Minnesota’s Red River Valley, and Cash is making extra money plowing fields. But, when she notices a car running all day in front of a farmhouse, she finally investigates. In the kitchen, she finds the body of Bud Borgerud, the owner. He’s been shot to death, and his Native tenants, a husband and wife, are missing. Cash feels uneasy enough to search the house, and finds Shawnee, the couple’s daughter, hiding under a bed. The young girl seems in shock. She won’t talk, and Cash suspects she may have seen the killer.

Although Cash calls Wheaton, the local sheriff, and a friend, she’s angry when he insists he has to turn Shawnee over to Child Services. For years, Cash suffered through the foster care system, and she worries about Shawnee, especially when Jean Borgerud, widow of the dead farmer, insists on taking the child. Wheaton may try to shut her out of the case, and out of the investigation of a bank robbery, but Cash’s special intuition, her gift, tells her there’s more trouble in both cases.

When a second body is found on Borgerud’s farm, Cash’s primary worry is for Shawnee. She knows firsthand the trauma and problems that occur in the foster care system, and Jean Borgerud doesn’t seem the motherly type. Cash heads to the White Earth Reservation, searching for Shawnee’s missing mother, but all along she’s determined to find answers for the young girl that reminds Cash so much of herself when she was trapped with uncaring adults.

Broken Fields is a murder mystery, but it’s also an indictment of the foster care system, and the traumas inflicted on Indigenous children. It isn’t often we see Cash Blackbear break down, but her own past comes back to haunt her when she tries to help another child trapped in the system. Cash’s reactions in this book are as impulsive as ever, but her deep scars are evident in this latest story.

Renee "Cash" Blackbear came up through the system. She and her sister and brother were taken away from their mother after she crashed her car driving drunk. Cash went through a lot of foster homes and knows the routine. The one bright spot in her life was Sheriff Wheaton, who found her in the crashed car and has remained a constant in her life. She even works for the sheriff's department occasionally where her intuition has paid dividends in solving cases. Cash finds a body in an empty farmhouse after finishing a day of plowing fields. She has finds a terrified little girl who witnessed the murder. Cash does not want Shawnee disappearing into the system as she did. When the social worker places Shawnee with a widow of the murdered man, Cash gets more and more suspicious. Jonesy, the Native American woman teaching her how to use her intuition, is circumspect as to how Cash's journey will move forward, but Jonesy assures Cash that Shawnee's mother will come forward in time. Cash knows she must protect Shawnee at all costs. Set in the last 70s, this is an interesting look at life at the time Native American rights are becoming an issue. An interesting read.