DAKOTA
Martha Grimes
Viking
Fiction
ISBN: 9780670018697

One of the best parts of starting any new book is the anticipation of what comes next. Will you greet old friends to stroll through familiar haunts and join in their adventures? Will an entirely new world come to life with exciting new people in new places? When the novel is by a seasoned series author like Martha Grimes, whose strongest suit is developing memorable characters in interesting places, you can be sure of one thing: you’re in for a good read.

In DAKOTA, Grimes brings back a truly remarkable young woman by the name of Andi Oliver, first created in BITING THE MOON, a stand-alone novel released in 1999. Andi comes to us as fresh as any character can possibly be. She woke up in a Santa Fe motel not knowing who or where she was, where she had been, and with no identity or clues to her past. This is the way we meet new characters in fiction all the time, relying on the author to fill in the back story. Andi is unique in that she has to make up her own identity to survive, thus creating her own back story. And what an imagination she has! She invents an entirely fictional wealthy Long Island family, which makes for amusing moments as she tries to remember non-existent siblings and past events. So our Andi is creating herself in her own fiction. Now there’s a new twist!

Andi is one of many heroines Grimes has brought us outside of her well-loved Richard Jury mysteries. No setting could be further from the cozy firesides in the famous English pubs of her mystery books than the wide open plains of the American West. Fans have asked so often if she was going to write another novel about Andi that she decided the young woman with the cast iron backbone and an affinity for abused animals had more adventures to share. After surviving in the wilds of New Mexico and Idaho, Andi is on the road again, hitchhiking through the Dakota plains. She works her way northwest through waitressing jobs to sustain her minimalist lifestyle and finds herself in a remote North Dakota town whose main industry is a factory farm --- a hog containment industry where pigs are raised for area packing plants.

Andi, who has already killed a man in Idaho in self-defense, seems to be a magnet for trouble, and she stirs up the suspicions of the local townspeople by rescuing an abandoned donkey belonging to a local rancher and scuffling with his bullying sons, which brings the local sheriff into the picture. She is befriended by an aging local rancher who provides food and shelter in return for mucking stalls for his livestock and exercising his racehorse, Dakota. When she goes to work at the factory farm, she witnesses how cruelly the animals are treated and tries to bring about changes. Already being shadowed by someone from her unknown past, she becomes the target of the factory farm management, who see her as a threat to their enterprise. The novel builds to high suspense when the man from her past and a hired killer from the factory farm get her in their gun sights.

Grimes, a long-time vegetarian, is donating a significant amount of her royalties from DAKOTA to select animal rights groups. As a long-time meat eater who especially enjoys a rack of ribs or a juicy steak, I must admit that my eyes were opened by this novel. It is not a diatribe or soap box, but those pristine packages of clear-wrapped chops and steaks look a little different to me now. I found myself Googling vegetarian recipes after I closed the book on the last chapter.

    --- Reviewed by Roz Shea

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