Winter Counts

I thoroughly enjoyed this new crime novel set on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, home to the Sicangu Lakota nation. (Weiden is a citizen of the Sicangu Lakota Nation and received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts.) Virgil Wounded Horse is a Native American vigilante for hire: when people can't get justice through the reservation's official channels they turn to him to enact their own. This happens with depressing regularity because of the 1885 Major Crimes Act: certain felonies can only be prosecuted by the federal government, but at their discretion—and they typically decline to prosecute any case that doesn't include murder (Weiden says in his Author's Note that this circumstance is factual and all-too-real.) When Virgil's nephew gets entrapped in a fake drug bust, authorities more or less force the young teen to take a dangerous undercover assignment so they can nail the men who are trafficking heroin on the reservation. While the story is solid, this book shines for its setting, and its powerful exploration of identity. Though this reads as a standalone, Weiden left the door wide open for a sequel; I'm certainly interested in reading more. (Though the story is rarely graphic in portraying violence, the novel does begin with Virgil knocking out a child molester's teeth in a parking lot, please be mindful of the associated content.)