Thread: Wanbli Weiden's 'Winter Counts' deserves more fanfare

For this week’s Thread: Kerri Miller begins a series this morning that will give more attention to authors you might not have heard about, and would be great ideas for the holiday season.

I would love to think that all of the books I’m going to recommend through the end of the year will find their way onto the bestseller list.  But that list is occupied, more and more, by household name authors who don’t need the publicity.

So, I’m going to bring you a book each week through the end of December that had a rather quiet launch — came and went without a lot of fanfare — but deserves to end up on your indie bookstore gift-giving list.

Now, David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s “Winter Counts” has won a lot of critical acclaim and I loved the novel so much that I’m sending it to all of the members of my Kerri Miller Book Circle. 

But this isn’t a flashy, cinematic, thriller of a story. It’s melancholy and hushed, and even though at times I wished for more introspection from the main character, I relished the spareness of Wanbli Weiden’s writing. 

Here’s the story: Virgil Wounded Horse metes out his own form of fist-driven justice on the Lakota Rosebud reservation while he helps to raise his nephew, Nathan. Virgil is often laconic and not particularly idealistic, but when Nathan almost dies from a heroin overdose, Virgil comes up with a plan to bust up a conspiracy and exact revenge.

He’s also reconnected with a high school love who IS idealistic and the interactions between Wounded Horse and with Marie Short Bear, who is home for a few months while she applies to medical school, are revealing.

Wanbli Weiden, who grew up in Colorado and is a member of the Lakota nation, grew up borrowing books from a Bookmobile, devouring the works of Edgar Allan Poe and cherishing Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove.”

He told the L.A. Review of Books that joining the small cadre of Native crime fiction writers is heady. “Crime fiction is such a perfect fit for writers of color,” he said, “because it gives us a wonderful lens in which to focus on inequities in society.”

So, My Thread “Autumn 2020 Can’t Miss” and Must-Read is David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s “Winter Counts.”

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