Marcie R Rendon Books in Order

If you want the Cash Blackbear series from the beginning: Murder on the Red River → Girl Gone Missing → Sinister Graves → Broken Fields
If you want a contemporary standalone thriller: Where They Last Saw Her
If you want Rendon in poetry mode: Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium
If you want family nonfiction for younger readers: Powwow Summer → Farmer's Market: Families Working Together

Marcie R. Rendon was born in Norman County, Minnesota, in 1952 and grew up in northern Minnesota. She is a citizen of the White Earth Nation, and that sense of place runs through her work. Whether she is writing crime fiction, poetry, children's books, or theater, her stories stay close to land, community, and the everyday lives of Native people.

She has said she started writing almost as soon as she learned how to write. As a kid she read constantly, the kind of reader who would read cereal boxes if there was nothing else around. The local bookmobile mattered, too. For a future writer in rural Minnesota, that weekly stack of books was no small thing.

College came with politics. At Moorhead State in the early 1970s, Rendon studied criminal justice and American Indian studies, and she was part of the Native student activists who pushed the school to create its first American Indian studies department. For a while she thought law school might be the route, in part because so many Native students were told they needed practical careers to go back and help their people.

Writing never left her.

After moving to Minneapolis in the late 1970s, she worked as a counselor and therapist while raising three daughters. Her jobs included work with Native inmates preparing for reentry, along with adolescents and adults in treatment programs. She kept writing on the side. When one job ended and a severance gave her time, she used that opening the way many writers dream about, she wrote anything that would pay, from journalism to nonprofit reports, while also teaching herself what kind of fiction she wanted to make.

Her first published books were for younger readers. Powwow Summer and Farmer's Market: Families Working Together introduced children to Native family and community life in the present day, which mattered to Rendon because she grew up without books that reflected Native kids back to themselves. Around the same time, seeing a Native woman perform live theater opened another door for her, and she went on to write for the stage and build community arts work through Raving Native Theater.

Then Cash Blackbear showed up.

With Murder on the Red River, Rendon found the character who carried her into crime fiction: a tough, intuitive young Ojibwe woman working the Red River Valley in the 1970s. The novel won the Pinckley Prize for debut crime fiction, and Cash returned in Girl Gone Missing, Sinister Graves, and Broken Fields. Readers tend to come for the mystery and stay for Cash herself, her dry toughness, her dreams, her friendship with Sheriff Wheaton, and Rendon's sharp feel for rural Minnesota and reservation life.

Rendon has also written beyond the series. Where They Last Saw Her moves into a contemporary story about missing Indigenous women in Minnesota, while Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium brings her poetry and spoken-word roots to the front. Across genres, some concerns keep returning: land, family, Native women and children, the foster care system, survival, grief, and the stubborn fact of community. Her books do not look away from violence, but they also make room for humor, memory, and people who keep one another going.

In 2020, Rendon received the McKnight Distinguished Artist Award, becoming the first Native American woman to receive it, and Adler University awarded her an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. She lives in Minneapolis and has long used her work to support other Native artists, writers, and organizers. That mix of art and community feels central to everything she does. She writes gripping stories, yes, but she also keeps making room for other people to be seen.