1970s Minnesota. It's spring in the Red River Valley and Cash Blackbear is doing summer field work for Bud Borgerud, a local farmer-until she finds him dead on the kitchen floor of the property's rented farmhouse. The only possible witness to the murder is the young daughter of a Native field laborer who was renting the house. The girl, Shawnee, is too terrified to speak about what she's witnessed, and her parents seem to have vanished. In the wake of the murder, Cash can't deny her intuitive abilities: she is suspicious of the dead man's grieving widow, who offers to take in Shawnee temporarily. While Cash scours the county and White Earth reservation trying to find the missing mother before the Shawnee is placed in the care of a social worker-the same woman who placed Cash in foster care a decade earlier-another body turns up. Concerned about the girl's fate, and with the help of local Sheriff Wheaton, Cash races against the clock to figure out the truth of what happened in the farmhouse. Broken Fields is a compelling, fast read with seamlessly woven in details of rural life, the American Indian Movement, abusive farm labor practices, and women's liberation.