Dancing Around the Four Sides

Earlier this week I finished another commute audiobook, Looking for Smoke by K.A. Cobell. This is a crime thriller/murder mystery that takes place on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. When a teenage girl is found strangled at the Indian Days summer powwow, four of her classmates become the prime suspects in her murder. 

I would say this is a solid entry in the murder mystery genre. The book alternates perspectives between the four classmates, which allows the author to do some fun things keeping the reader on the hook. One character will make a big discovery only for the POV to pop over to another who doesn't have that information, so Cobell can keep information from the reader without it feeling too forced. The audiobook has a separate narrator for each POV, which was also fun (although I didn't care for Eli's reader) and if you're prone to picking up and putting down your audiobook in the middle of a chapter, this helps you keep track of whose POV you're in.

Cobell uses the format of the crime thriller, like Marcie Rendon in Where They Last Saw Her, to draw attention to the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), but the book still feels like a novel its own right; it never feels like just a tool for explaining the MMIW issue. And it's an important issue that deserves a lot more attention. The statistics on violence against Native American women are shocking--even if you think they're bad, they're probably worse than you're imagining--and specific stats get highlighted in the text and in the author's note at the end. In this way, I think the book has enormous social value. Cobell uses her characters to personalize the problem and show the comorbid impacts of poverty and drug use on the reservation. 

Outside of its interest in the MMIW crisis, I don't think the book does much that's particularly groundbreaking. The teens band together to try to solve the mystery and absolve themselves, as you'd expect. At various times they suspect each other, family members, law enforcement. Cobell keeps you on the hook while offering reasonable suspicion for a number of characters. She avoids my least favorite move in the murder mystery genre, which is pinning it on some rando at the last minute.

The ending is pretty explosive and I enjoy some of the things she does with perspective here as well. We the readers know what the killer thinks of their crimes because the text tells us. But the other characters never hear that explanation except third hand, and many of them simply don't believe it. And that feels real--they end the story with their own version of the truth and there's simply no space for that to be corrected (and why would they believe the word of a killer anyway?) The killer feels a little one-dimensional, but the motives make sense, if they're unsurprising. The motivations behind most violent crimes are pretty repetitive. 

The prose is fine. We're reading from the perspective of teenagers, so expect a lot of melodramatic metaphors and jumping to conclusions based on minimal evidence.

Overall, this book tells an important story. It was entertaining as a narrative and sheds light on a community that deserves a lot more attention.