About this series
Former foreign correspondent Lola Wicks is getting a little bored in Magpie, Montana, where she landed at a small local newspaper after being downsized from her job in Kabul. Then Judith Calf Looking, a local Blackfeet girl missing for several months, turns up dead in a snowbank with a mysterious brand on her forearm. The sheriff - whose romantic relationship with Lola provides Magpie with its most delicious gossip in years - thinks Judith probably froze to death while hitch-hiking back to the reservation from wherever she'd been.
But Lola hears rumors that Judith had been working as an exotic dancer in the North Dakota oil fields, and further discovers that several Blackfeet girls, all known drug users, have gone missing over the past year. She heads out to the oil patch to check things out, only to find herself in a place where men outnumber women a hundred to one, the law looks the other way, and life - especially her own - is cheap.
Dakota shows the frightening underside of a boom-and-bust economy; of the effect on a small town when big-city money washes in, accompanied by hordes of men far from their families; of what happens when the old rules no longer apply, but the new ones are yet to be determined.
Titles in the series (2)
- Montana
1
Foreign correspondent Lola Wicks is pissed. She's been downsized from her Kabul posting. Her editor reassigns her to a stateside suburban beat formerly the province of interns. When she arrives in Montana for some R&R at a friend's cabin, her friend is nowhere in sight. Anger turns to terror when Lola discovers her friend shot dead. She can't get out of Montana fast enough, until she finds that she can't get out at all. She's held as a potential witness, thwarting her plan to return on her own to Afghanistan to write the stories she's sure will persuade her editors to change their minds. Her best hope lies in solving the case herself. But the surefooted journalist who deftly negotiated Afghanistan's deadly terrain finds herself frighteningly off-balance in this forgotten corner of her own country, plagued by tensions between the locals and citizens of the nearby Blackfeet Nation. Lola's lone-wolf style doesn't work in a place where the harsh landscape and extreme isolation compel people to rely upon each other in ways she finds unsettling. In her awkward attempts at connection, by turns touching and humorous, Lola forms a reluctant alliance with a local reporter, succumbs to the romantic attentions of a wealthy rancher, and fences warily with the state's first Indian candidate for governor, the subject of her friend's final stories. Initially pretending interest to glean information, Lola comes to truly care about the people she meets in Montana, only to miss the warning signals that her own life is in danger. Even as she unravels her friend's terrible fate, Lola Wicks joins many Americans in learning the hard lessons of a fraught economy - that circumstances change in a flash, that formerly overlooked places and people can hold deep value, and that in the end human bonds matter so much more than fleeting career success.
- Dakota
2
Former foreign correspondent Lola Wicks is getting a little bored in Magpie, Montana, where she landed at a small local newspaper after being downsized from her job in Kabul. Then Judith Calf Looking, a local Blackfeet girl missing for several months, turns up dead in a snowbank with a mysterious brand on her forearm. The sheriff - whose romantic relationship with Lola provides Magpie with its most delicious gossip in years - thinks Judith probably froze to death while hitch-hiking back to the reservation from wherever she'd been. But Lola hears rumors that Judith had been working as an exotic dancer in the North Dakota oil fields, and further discovers that several Blackfeet girls, all known drug users, have gone missing over the past year. She heads out to the oil patch to check things out, only to find herself in a place where men outnumber women a hundred to one, the law looks the other way, and life - especially her own - is cheap. Dakota shows the frightening underside of a boom-and-bust economy; of the effect on a small town when big-city money washes in, accompanied by hordes of men far from their families; of what happens when the old rules no longer apply, but the new ones are yet to be determined.
Gwen Florio
Gwen Florio is the author of Silent Hearts. She grew up in a 250-year-old brick farmhouse on a wildlife refuge in Delaware and now lives in Montana. Currently the city editor for the Missoulian, Gwen has reported on the Columbine High School shooting and from conflict zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. Montana, her first novel in the Lola Wicks detective series, won the High Plains Book Award and the Pinckley Prize for debut crime fiction.
Read more from Gwen Florio
Montana Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Silent Hearts: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dakota Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Reservations Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDisgraced Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnder the Shadows Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Lola Wicks Mystery
Related ebooks
Crossed Wires: Team-Up Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Christmas Fish Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings10th use: Giant Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMorals for Minions Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFemale Force: Carrie Fisher Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Flying Saucers Vs. the Earth #3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThree-Fold Cord: Creation Redemption Dominion Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNanny & Hank #3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlackbeard Legacy #2 Volume 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPolitical Power: Joe Biden Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Female Force: Cher Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVincent Price Presents: Phibes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYour Guide To: Fearless Entrepreneurship Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMud Pups’ Adventures vol. 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGood Jokes Bad Drawings Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLonging for Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLegend of Isis: The First Flight of Horus Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBreaking Down the Wall Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFinding Treasured Gold Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExtreme Rhyming Poetry: Over 400 Inspirational Poems of Wit, Wisdom, and Humor (Five Books in One) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlackbeard Legacy #0 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsColonial Comics: New England: 1620 - 1750 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Legend of Isis #12: Volume 2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFlying Saucers Vs. the Earth #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGLO Workbooks Great Learning Opportunity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings15 Minutes: Kim Kardashian Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Sonoma - Valley of the Moon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSweet Pea Saves the Rainbows Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSoma Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLegend of Isis: Image Introduces Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Literary Fiction For You
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tattooist of Auschwitz: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Handmaid's Tale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Who Have Never Known Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Pulitzer Prize Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Annihilation: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lady Tan's Circle of Women: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pride and Prejudice: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm Thinking of Ending Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Queen's Gambit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anna Karenina: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Piranesi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Woman in the Room: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tender Is the Flesh Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Lola Wicks Mystery
63 ratings0 reviews