WISDOM CORNER, second Virgil Wounded Horse thriller

WISDOM CORNER
DAVID HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN
Ecco (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of Winter Counts comes a new thriller about life—and death—on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.

Virgil Wounded Horse is desperately trying to escape his past as a hired vigilante on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. But when a legendary figure from the reservation is murdered, he’s forced to return to the job. Making matters more complicated, threats are coming from the Pine Ridge 705—a street gang from a neighboring reservation who want to expand their reach into Rosebud—and Mitch Gagnon, a shady politician who will stop at nothing to gain more power.

With a heated tribal council election looming, as well as new revelations regarding past injustices at the local Native boarding school, the stakes grow even higher. Will Virgil find the justice he’s seeking before it’s too late?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Coming to terms with harms and wrongs you've done, even when you thought you were right to do them, is a tough passage of adulthood. It's necessary to face up, and if necessary 'fess up, in order to move past your own guilt and self-trauma. Of course, that leaves all the nightmares of trauma caused from without...but starting within is always sound policy and strategy.

Picking up where Winter Counts left off is this story of Virgil Wounded Horse doing his damnedest to keep his homeplace from succumbing to the depredations of the worst, most amoral forces from without and those within who care little for humane results and lots for power and the money that flows along side it. Virgil knows from the inside the seductive nature of power, enforcing criminals' will isn't a lot different from enforcing The Law℠ in its particulars only in its motivations (hopefully its results too). Challenging Virgil's sense of rightness is the death by murder of Jerome Iron Shell. Beloved by many for his warmth and wisdom and stock of lore, whatever led someone to kill him makes Virgil angry as well as woriied for his inamorata Marie Little Bear. Her deepening involvement in politics on Rosebud Reservation is clearly not safe sonve politics is almost certainly what got Jerome killed...how to make your former-gang-enforcer boyfried edgy and worried for you was never easier for Marie. She's the one whose request for him to staighten up, work the sunny side of the street, thus not add to her hurdles getting into government to start cleaning up generations of greed and indifference, has Virgil in knots. To her credit, Marie Little Bear is very much on the side of Justice and Fairness so as Virgil discovers corruption and greed, Marie stands shoulder-to-shoulder damn the consequences.

I really like the couple dynamic between Virgil and Marie. As the vileness and ugliness that Jerome was aware of, and trying to get acknowledged, intertwines with the appalling greed that land development supports and rewards, Virgil...and Marie...learn even the lowest acts they know happen now aren't a patch on those committed in the not-distant past. It serves to make them both, together and individually, more determined to be forces for improvement and restoration.

The series is definitely one I recommend to y'all who're needing more than polite white ladies looking into polite little family deaths. Cozies are like pineapple: tasty, tangy, but not healthy when they're the only thing on the dessert menu. Switch it up with a trip to South Dakota.

WINTER COUNTS, Native American #OwnVoices thriller

WINTER COUNTS
DAVID HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN
Ecco
$16.99 trade paper, available now

WINNER OF THE BEST FIRST NOVEL ANTHONY AWARD FOR 2021! Virtual Bouchercon award ceremonies linked to at the above.

WINNER OF THE BEST INDIGENOUS WRITER at the 2021 High Plains Book Awards.

On The Guardian’s Best Thrillers of 2021 list

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A groundbreaking thriller about a vigilante on a Native American reservation who embarks on a dangerous mission to track down the source of a heroin influx.

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.

They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is a Brulé Lakota Winter Count:

This cultural tradition, extremely briefly summarized in a Wikipedia article, organizes this novel’s ideas. Virgil Wounded Horse, our aptly and prophetically named vigilante-cum-enforcer hero in this thriller, touches on this fascinating piece of (half) his ancestry’s sense of time and place often enough to make the title of the book emerge organically in the reader’s mind. Virgil muses at one point, “Winter counts were the calendar system used by the Lakota, but they weren't like modern ones. I'd loved the little pictures in the calendars, each image showing the most significant event from the past year.” He muses again, at a later point, “Winter counts. This was the winter of my sorrow, one I had tried to elude but which had come for me with a terrible cruelty.” I think both are ideas of how he, his world, and his sense of self, are in motion at all times. It makes his entire life spent in action make sense…he’s not a Lakota insider, like ex-girlfriend Marie Short Bear, whose ancestry is flawlessly pureblood and perfectly in tune with the power structure within the Rosebud Reservation. He’s not an insider in the white world, either, being a mixed-race outcast from its racist system. It’s been a blessing in that any curse can be turned into an advantage if you’re looking for a way to do it. He’s got a place enforcing justice outside white and Native American legal systems, as required.

What this means is that the character is perfect for a thriller that needs telling to get people to care about the problems heaped on Outsiders, Othered people, by all systems of government. The tribal justice system (arguably distorted by its necessary accommodation to white codes) as much as any other. Virgil is outside, and that is the perfect place to be when the upper echelon needs something done that won’t “look good.” The value of face, of taking things at face value, is something white people with our media obsession have raised to virtual apotheosis; it’s far from untrue of other cultures, however. Marie Little Bear’s tribal leadership position means he can’t directly do the effective thing against the drug cartels hooking Native kids on heroin, with the well-known tragic consequences.

Had the plague not touched Virgil’s nephew, hard, he wouldn’t have agreed to take on the violent and greedy and frankly evil people. But when it’s family, things look different, don’t they. What happens on the reservation has its roots in the not-distant city of Denver. Marie and Virgil set out to confront the ills of their corner of the world by going outside that corner, by bearding the lion in his den, and they are not surprisingly at some disadvantages there. It is as revealing to consider their troubles and issues within the white world of Denver as to examine the world of the reservation in promotion, tolerance, and perpetuation of toxic social maladjustment.

I’m impressed by the way this thriller uses its author’s straddled worlds…he’s Lakota and teaches Native American Studies at the Metropolitan State College of Denver, so clearly he’s quite adept at code-switching…as a full and integrated world for Virgil Wounded Horse. We’re not expected to see Virgil as a man out of place in two worlds, we’re expected to see a man discovering his place in his own world. It is a fine distinction, but an important one. Virgil is an outsider in each of those large, obvious social constructs. He is making his own world, one in which he is the norm, as in the end that is what we all must do to “fit in.” Where the world doesn’t have a place for you, make one.

That is the gift of this read to the reader. Join Virgil Wounded Horse in his thrilling world.
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This post is the 1,000th on my blog! I’ve written many thousands of book reviews over the years of many truly enjoyable books. I’m very happy that, after eight and a half years, I’ve reached this milestone blog post with a review of a book I’m happy to recommend that you read as a Booksgiving treat to yourself.