Debut
Laurie Dove’s debut novel, Mask of the Deer Woman, is a mystery centering on the many missing and murdered indigenous women who have vanished throughout the southwest and beyond. There have been several books on this topic, recently William Kent Krueger’s Spirit Crossing and Vanessa Lillie’s Blood Sisters, as well as a searing television show, True Detective: Night Country. Dove frames her story with a strong and troubled female character. Carrie Starr, an ex-Chicago cop, has made her way to her long ago childhood home, Oklahoma, where she has ties to the rez and is the newly appointed Federal Marshal for the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs).
Working through a miasma of grief – Carrie has lost her own daughter – as well as working through her childhood memories and connections, Starr is hardly an efficient officer when she arrives at what is probably her last chance job. She’s unfocused, drinking, and smoking weed. When she arrives, she’s almost immediately approached by a mother whose daughter has joined the ranks of the missing, and who has been dismissed. Her daughter, Chenoa, was a promising grad student who may have discovered an endangered beetle on lands slated for development and fracking.
There are many other missing girls and Starr eventually begins to search through the file boxes that line her office, discovering old cases and in some of them, a connection. This is what I would call an emotional thriller (much like Krueger’s and Lillie’s books). Because the framing device is a grieving woman who must power through her grief to get to the job at hand, it tilts the story a bit. While as a reader you’re pretty sure she’s going to right herself, writer Dove still manages to make this a bit of a question.
The mystery portion of the novel is part political corruption, part ticking clock thriller, and the discovery of how the two threads might be related is the story of the novel. Meanwhile, Dove effectively paints a picture of the pain of those left behind, as well as the parent’s frustration in getting law enforcement to take them seriously. Chenoa’s mother is a true force of nature, as is her ancient grandmother – swathed in blankets and making pronouncements from her chair – and little by little, Carrie again learns to listen.
She’s also guided by the “Deer Woman,” a spirit that appears with hooves and antlers and who seems to be leading Carrie when she most needs a guide. The Deer Woman seems to be protective of the missing women, and malevolent toward whatever forces made them disappear. As Carrie’s fog of grief begins to clear she allows herself to think she can at least save this one girl, even though the body of another girl has turned up in the course of her investigation.
I loved the setting and the characters in this novel and I thought Carrie’s journey through grief was both provocative and moving. I was slightly disappointed in the resolution which in one way was a huge twist but in another was pretty conventional. However, the writing and characters would bring me back for another investigation with Carrie Starr. — Robin Agnew