Cry of the Rain Crow

Seven Mile Lake is hiding something, and in Dove’s gripping follow-up to Mask of the Deer Woman, that something is about to surface. When a boy takes a girl he’s trying to impress out on the water, a naked stranger swims toward their boat and attacks. Later, his body turns up in the lake, missing its heart. He worked for Blackstream Oil, the company drilling on Saliquaw Nation land; Blackstream has been at war with the locals since the day it arrived. Tribal Marshal Starr, a former Chicago cop still fighting to earn her place in the community, is pulled into the wreckage of corporate greed, a cold case involving a missing reservation girl, and secrets she was never meant to find. As the local wildlife turns feral and the drilling site’s methods look more unscrupulous by the day, Starr races to connect the threads before the lake, and everyone living beside it, pays the price. Dove delivers an atmospheric, folklore-steeped mystery anchored by Starr, a flawed and fiercely human protagonist whose search for answers doubles as a search for her own redemption. What she uncovers is as unsettling as it is unputdownable. Just don’t drink the water.—Jeff Ayers