A visceral and compelling mystery about a
Cherokee archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who is summoned
to rural Oklahoma to investigate the disappearance of two women…one of
them her sister.
There are secrets in the land.
As an
archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her
days in Rhode Island trying to protect the land's indigenous past, even
as she’s escaping her own.
While Syd is dedicated to her job,
she’s haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma
hometown fifteen years ago. Though she swore she’d never go back, the
past comes calling.
When a skull is found near the crime scene of
her youth, just as her sister, Emma Lou, vanishes, Syd knows she must
return home. She refuses to let her sister's disappearance, or the
remains, go ignored—as so often happens in cases of missing Native
women.
But not everyone is glad to have Syd home, and she can
feel the crosshairs on her back. Still, the deeper Syd digs, the more
she uncovers about a string of missing indigenous women cases going back
decades. To save her sister, she must expose a darkness in the town
that no one wants to face—not even Syd.
The truth will be unearthed.
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What I thought about Blood Sisters
Syd Walker is a Native American archeologist for the Bureau of Indian
Affairs (BIA). I have to admit I wasn't well-versed in the different
governmental agencies involved with Native Americans and that was quite
the eye-opener in this story. Syd is currently living in Rhode Island
and gets reassigned to help investigate the case of a skull found with
her ID card. Yeah. Creepy.
To say that Syd doesn't want to return
to Oklahoma is an understatement. After a devastating incident in her
teens, she doesn't want to go back there. There's too much trouble, too
many missing girls and now her sister is one of them. Blood Ties is very
much about Syd recovering from what happened with the "devils" and
figuring out who she is in the present. She often sees and hears her
deceased sister Luna. Her wife is pregnant and she's ambivalent about
it. Lots of mixed emotions and failures color her thinking.
As
Syd hunts for her other sister, she's fearless, sometimes getting into
some very dangerous situations. But she doesn't give up her search for
truth and justice. The story moves along quite well and there's a
complexity that I liked. This was quite a bit of new material for me
regarding Native American conditions and culture and I really liked that
about the story, even though it wasn't always butterflies and roses. It
was dark and gritty and didn't always work out the way things should.
I
feel like I must mention that the author's notes are a must read for
this title. The missing indigenous women are not fiction -- this story
is based on real events. I thoroughly enjoyed the Native American
culture that graces this book and those were the parts I liked the most.
I did like Syd as well -- from her confusion to her dedication, she was
a very interesting character.
So overall, I liked this story and
what I learned while reading it. It wasn't just a suspenseful thriller
-- it's a powerful story about indigenous people and their history. It's
about exploitation of resources and the impact of addiction. There's a
lot to unpack here, and it was worth it.
About the Author
Vanessa is the author of the bestselling thrillers Little Voices (October 2019) and For the Best (September 2020). She also co-authored the instant bestselling and ITW award nominated Audible Original Young Rich Widows (April 2022), with 20,000 reviews the sequel forthcoming. Her next novel, Blood Sisters, launches October 31st, and begins a new series with #MMIW2S at the heart of the stories.
With fifteen years of marketing and communications experience, Vanessa was a columnist for the Providence Journal and hosts an Instagram Live show with crime fiction authors. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma living on Narragansett land in Rhode Island.
