Blood Relay — Devon Mihesuah

In this richly layered debut mystery reminiscent of the real issue of missing and murdered Indigenous people, a badass Choctaw detective discovers an insidious plot against her reservation while investigating the disappearance of a beloved champion athlete.Choctaw Detective Perry Antelope has been with her partner, Sophia Burns, for only six months. Perry is a seasoned investigator while the ex-Olympian shot putter Sophia is a former street-smart police officer. Together, they are an intrepid pair with an established record of success. But when Perry and Sophia are called to investigate the disappearance of Dels Billy, a beloved women’s Indian Horse Relay rider, they quickly realize that it’s not as cut-and-dry as anything they’ve faced before.Piece by piece, they uncover unsettling connections between Dels’s disappearance and a series of unsolved abductions of women from Oklahoma reservations. But the perpetrator always seems to be one step ahead, and Perry soon finds herself—and her family—in the crosshairs of a ruthless killer. Despite her husband’s pleas for her to drop the case, Perry is determined to prevent Dels from becoming another statistic.As the investigation deepens, Perry and Sophia follow a tangled web of clues that point to a close-to-home plot more chilling than they could have imagined. Torn between her family’s safety and her duty to her community, Perry must race against the clock, and across tribal Nations, to find Dels before her murderous abductor can carry out their sinister plan.