31 March 2022.
ISBN: 978-1-3985-0933-7 (PB)
Justice. It lies at the heart of every crime novel. Sometimes it’s the legal kind: the villain gets his comeuppance through the rule of law. At other times the law fails or isn’t enough; that’s when the cosmic kind comes into play.
But there’s a third kind of crime novel: the kind in which justice doesn’t quite do the job, and the reader is moved to question the kind of world we live in, because the fiction reflects reality all too closely. This novel is the third kind, and it reflects an unjust reality which is everyday life for an often-forgotten minority.
To a lot of people native Americans, or Indians (they refer to themselves in both ways) are the bad guys of countless Hollywood movies. That’s fiction, and the modern reality is very different; many native Americans still live on reservations in Third World conditions, subject to prejudice, and to neglect and broken promises by successive governments. It’s a world which is familiar to David Heska Wanbli Weiden, a member of the Sicangu Lakota nation with family on the reservation which forms the backdrop to Winter Counts, his first novel featuring Virgil Wounded Horse.
If that all sounds too worthy and didactic to make gripping fiction, fear not; it has the essential elements in abundance. There are characters to root for or boo at, plenty of drama and tension, and an intricate plot which slowly unravels. Virgil is a rounded personality, likeable despite his faults; Nathan is a normal teenager looking for answers; some of the other characters are good, some are bad, most are as flawed as Virgil to a greater or lesser extent. Virgil is an enforcer; he goes in search of justice for victims of crimes let down by the American legal system, an all too frequent occurrence in his world. It all becomes personal for him when his nephew Nathan overdoses on illegal drugs and becomes entangled with federal agents seeking to bring down a cartel.
What follows is a complex web of deceit and misdirection, with good and bad guys from both white and native worlds. Virgil is left wondering who can be trusted, and though a kind of justice does prevail – this is crime fiction, after all – the reader has no option but to doubt the system which has created the conditions the novel portrays so graphically.
As well as an all too
accurate depiction of everyday native American life, it’s a gripping, pacy
story set against a detailed background. For me it fulfilled the three criteria
of a great crime novel: it made me laugh, cry and think. And above all it kept
me reading.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick
David Heska Wanbli Weiden is an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota Nation and received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He's a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Tin House Scholar, and the recipient of the PEN/America's Writing for Justice Fellowship. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen,
and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but
never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher
for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now
burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half
of them crime fiction.
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