Goodreads description: To find a missing young woman, the new tribal marshal must also find herself. At rock bottom following her daughter’s murder, ex-Chicago detective Carrie Starr has nowhere to go but back to her roots. Starr’s father never talked much about the reservation that raised him, but they need a new tribal marshal as much as Starr needs a place to call home. In the last decade, too many young women have disappeared from the rez. Some dead, others just… gone. Now, local college student Chenoa Cloud is missing, and Starr falls into an investigation that leaves her drowning in memories of her daughter—the girl she failed to save. Starr feels lost in this place she thought would welcome her. And when she catches a glimpse of a figure from her father’s stories, with the body of a woman and the antlers of a deer, Starr can’t shake the feeling that the fearsome spirit is watching her, following her. What she doesn’t know is whether Deer Woman is here to guide her or to seek vengeance for the lost daughters that Starr can never bring home.

This was one of my most anticipated new releases of 2025, and it didn’t disappoint. This is a really impressive debut novel full of suspense and mystery, magical realism, and important social commentary.

First, let’s talk about the plot. On the surface, this is a police procedural about a tribal marshal investigating the disappearance of an Indigenous woman. On that level, Dove does a good job of keeping up the pace of the mystery’s unravelling and leaving the reader guessing right up until the end as to whom Starr can trust and whom she can’t. I enjoyed the characters and dialogue, the suspense was sufficiently page-turning, and the resolution was pretty satisfying.

On another level, this novel weaves in elements of Indigenous mythology and magical realism, which are the aspects that drew me to the book from its description. Deer Woman is believed by many Indigenous North American peoples to be a vengeful supernatural being who targets men who inflict harm on women and children, so it makes perfect sense that Dove would integrate her into this story. I had expected to see more of Deer Woman throughout the novel, which might have tipped the genre more into horror than suspenseful mystery, but in the end I think Dove struck the correct balance here by weaving supernatural elements into a more grounded story. Does Deer Woman really exist, or does she simply represent the fighting spirit that lives within every mistreated woman? I think Dove leaves some room here for the reader to decide for themselves.

Where this novel really excels, though, is in its handling of major social issues such as missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (a problem so prevalent and urgent that it has its own acronym and, at least here in Canada, its own task force – MMIWG) as well as the imposition of pipelines and fracking on Indigenous lands. These issues are the main plot points of the story and are discussed at length by the characters and mused on by the narrator, yet at no point does it feel heavy-handed or an excuse for soapboxing by the author. These are real issues that affect the daily lives of the Indigenous peoples of this continent, and Dove explores them in a matter-of-fact way that emphasizes them as such. Additionally, Starr’s position as half-white, half-Indigenous, “a stranger between nations,” makes her the perfect unbiased bridge between the reader and the characters Starr meets – there is no stereotypically good side and bad side here, just human beings trying to make sense of the world and to do what they believe is best.

Something Dove says in her Author’s Note struck a chord with me: “We are all children of the same mother in the end.” It calls back to Starr’s musings on Suzanne Simard’s discovery of “mother trees,” the trees in a forest that nurture the younger ones and connect many trees together through their roots. I love the concept of the interconnectivity of trees (I even worked it into my undergraduate thesis on the personification of trees in literature), and I was moved by Dove’s (and Starr’s) thought that MMIWG are all connected in a similar way. Perhaps sometimes literally, since many probably end up buried in a woods somewhere, never to be found by their families. They’re in the company of Deer Woman, the mother trees, and each other, so they’ve never been alone.

I really enjoyed this novel. I’m excited to see what else Laurie L. Dove may write in the future.

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