Mask of the Deer Woman Review (Laurie L. Dove)

Cover for “Mask of the Deer Woman” by Laurie L. Dove. Image taken from Penguin Random House.

Lately something has been missing from my life. Perhaps it’s structure, or perhaps it’s something else. Either way, I went to the bookstore to get my sister a present, and I ended up coming across Mask of the Deer Woman, a new release by Laurie L. Dove. And as always, I supported my local bookstore rather than Amazon.

I chose this book because I’ve long been fascinated by issues related to the indigenous peoples of North America. In college, I wrote a 15-page research paper on the Internet’s impact on efforts to preserve minority languages. Long before that, I vaguely remember visiting a Wampanoag village on an elementary school field trip. They were here first, after all, and they had valuable knowledge about the land.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Mask of the Deer Woman promised to contain references to indigenous spirituality, and it delivered on this promise (more on that later.) I kept fantasizing about what it’d be like if Rick Riordan, author of Percy Jackson et al, would write a series about Native American deities. But again, enough about that.

The book centers around Carrie Starr, who goes by her last name. Starr is a former Chicago police detective whose teenage daughter, Quinn, has died. In an effort to distance herself from her past, Starr has accepted a job on a remote Native American reservation in Oklahoma. She will be a marshal, and she is tasked with locating an indigenous woman who has gone missing.

Now, the numerous reservations on American soil (and particularly the events leading up to them) are a giant stain in this nation’s history. These are some of the poorest locations in the U.S. economically, and characters in Mask of the Deer Woman refer to them as being “suffocating” places to live. Residents suffer from a host of social issues, such as crime and addiction. 

The specific problem depicted in this novel is the disappearance of indigenous women. According to the National Criminal Justice Training Center of the Fox Valley Technical College, indigenous women comprise 40% of sex trafficking victims in the United States even though their overall proportion of the population is more than an order of magnitude smaller than that. The same source states that as of 2022, there were almost seven hundred missing-person cases still open.

As for the specific woman who goes missing in the early pages of the novel, she’s a 22-year-old college student named Chenoa Cloud who went off looking for an American burying beetle. This beetle is classified as an endangered species, which is notable because if an endangered species is found on a specific parcel of land, that land must be protected from development. 

An American burying beetle, one of the book’s most important plot points. Image taken from Wikipedia.

Speaking of development, that’s another theme here. One of the novel’s villains is Horace Holder, a businessman in the oil and gas industry. Holder’s goal is to exploit the reservation’s land for drilling, and the members of the Native American nation that Chenoa belongs to actually agree to it. They’re told it will improve their standard of living, which, if you’re living in extreme poverty by American standards, is probably incredibly tempting.

This also, sadly, occurs all too frequently in real life. I’m the last person to say that both American political parties are the same, because that’s clearly not true. However, in 2024, then-President Biden approved the Willow Project near the indigenous town of Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska. Even if Republican administrations outright deny climate change, it sometimes feels like Democratic politicians don’t care as much as they say they do. Neither party has been particularly friendly to indigenous interests.

I will give the author, Laurie L. Dove, credit for something very important: Horace Holder is not portrayed one-dimensionally. There are chapters told from his point of view, and I think it’s always ideal for readers to see into the minds of the villains. It serves as a reminder that as greedy as Holder is, he’s still human. Indeed, some would say that his human nature drives his greed. In other words…

A still image from Tears For Fears’ music video for “Everybody Wants To Rule The World”. Image taken from Tenor.

In all seriousness, while I never sympathized with Holder, we at least got to see how his mind operates. We’re meant to dislike him, but we’re given a little more nuance than we might have in a book where the villains’ stories are never told. And again, I’m not trying to imply a moral equivalence here; I just thought Holder’s chapters were the most interesting part of the book.

The final theme I’ll get into is that of loss. Starr constantly thinks about her daughter, Quinn, who was murdered at age seventeen. She always wonders what she could have done differently to avoid such a fate, and she grieves almost nonstop. It’s a primary factor behind many of the decisions she makes, including her decision to look for Chenoa in the first place.

Now, I’ll add a disclaimer here: I don’t have kids. I don’t intend ever to have kids. I couldn’t imagine what Starr’s grief must have been like, because a parent’s ideally unconditional love for their child is supposedly more intense than any other form.

But when Starr thought of what she might do differently, I couldn’t help but think of the families from Sandy Hook, or Parkland, or Uvalde. Even though the parents did nothing wrong by sending their children to school (legally speaking, they had no other option), it’s probably the hardest thing in the world to constantly wonder what if. 

Starr knows that it’s too late to help Quinn, but if she can save Chenoa from a similar fate, she is determined to do just that. This reminded me of how most of the anti-NRA, pro-gun control groups such as Sandy Hook Promise and March For Our Lives are formed by the communities most directly affected by gun violence. If bigger organizations won’t step up, then those closest to the tragedy feel they must take matters into their own hands. And this is exactly what happens in Mask of the Deer Woman.

This book is categorized as a thriller. Personally, I didn’t find it as much of a page-turner as some other thrillers I’ve read. That does not, of course, make it a bad book; Ready Player One is far more exciting than The Great Gatsby, even though the latter is gold and the former is garbage. Indeed, Mask of the Deer Woman is meant to make you think - it is not remotely a “popcorn read” the likes of Ready Player One.

I would recommend this book for anyone who likes thrillers, but isn’t too focused on the legal aspects of a criminal case. I would also recommend it for someone who is very passionate about or interested in indigenous issues, or someone who is somewhat interested in these issues but also wants a decent mystery.

Thank you, Laurie L. Dove. You helped me kill a few hours home alone that I might otherwise have spent doing nothing at all. For that, I am grateful.