What I’m Reading: April 2026

Murder Most Foul

If it weren’t for the Tulsa Flyer I wouldn’t be reading murder mysteries. The April selection of the Flyer Book Club is Blood Sisters, by Vanessa Lillie (Berkley 2023). It’s not a pretty story. The tale traces the fictional journey of Syd Walker, a forensic archaeologist from Picher, Oklahoma and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, as she solves the murder of a childhood friend and rescues her own sister from captivity by a drug lord.

The backdrop comes from real life: the story plays out in the region of an abandoned superfund site in Picher whose residual pollution continues to poison generations of Oklahomans. Lillie’s sustained and vivid depiction of the fallout from this site shows the complicity of local and federal governments in the dispossession of Native peoples and the erosion of their health and opportunity. She makes readers feel the stubborn tangle of injustice that infects our biology, emotions, economics, social ties, and politics. This alone makes the book worth reading.

Blood Sisters serves an important purpose by vividly depicting outcomes of centuries of injustice and criminal abuse. Lillie’s characterization of Syd argues convincingly that such enduring threats result in pervasive mistrust, even in situations apparently unrelated to the abuse of people and land. Syd’s character also problematizes (without overturning) Native veneration of ancestors by depicting Syd’s reasoned hesitancy to become a parent and by unveiling how violence and abuse literally and figuratively poison successive generations. Lillie draws the character of Sue Dove in a way that shows readers how family loyalty can ensnare a person trying to uphold their commitment to morality. I appreciate the author’s avoidance of stereotype and her framing of characters in a tangled nexus of good and evil.

Nevertheless, I struggle with the progression of Lillie’s plot and especially its ultimate resolution. Syd’s swashbuckling adventures while grappling with her own demons and Oklahoma drug culture seem contrived and needlessly convoluted. The constant threat of violence gradually loses potency as one struggle after the next magically dissolves at the climactic point, leaving the protagonist with only minor scratches. The whipsaw of threat and safety clouds the gravity of the issues at stake.

If Blood Sisters venerates anything, it’s childhood innocence. Such veneration tempts nostalgia and sentimentality. Lillie’s narrative implies that no one is purely good except innocent children, and no one is purely evil except the novel’s antagonist. Both exceptions are problematic: the goodness of innocent children does not differ in kind from other types of goodness, and the possibility of a single individual embodying pure evil is both questionable and dangerous, as the novel’s plot demonstrates. Seeing characters in these absolutist terms justifies the premeditated, cold-blooded murder that resolves the novel’s plot. The novel’s conclusion reminds me of James, by Percival Everett (Doubleday 2024), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last year. Its plot similarly leads readers to feel (not think) that, while the murders committed by white slavers are outrageous and unjust, James’s murders of his oppressors are justifiable.

I am not willing to accept notions of pure good and pure evil. If good and evil intertwine, as human experience and other aspects of Lillie’s novel suggest, then our moral climate is always mixed, without exception. Both James and Blood Sisters implicitly authorize vigilantism by evoking sympathy for a character who acts on emotion instead of reasoned ethical deliberation. Such characterizations tempt readers to indulge feelings of rage, blind to their moral implications. Even more, they respond to systemic problems from an individualistic perspective. In my view, such a mismatch of problem and solution betrays the rightful role of literature and misses an opportunity to inspire the search for alternatives to revenge in addressing society’s systemic problems.

But then, where does this leave the issue of systemic injustice, oppression, and violence? Systemic problems cannot be resolved at an individual level. Unraveling systemic evil requires change in the structures that organize a society. Narrowing the focus to a single act slices a moment out of its context, obscuring the knotted enmeshment of survival in a context of injustice, replacing activism with rage. The reduction of social ills to interpersonal dynamics invites a binary choice between approving an action based on instinct and denouncing the action through a false and arrogant sense of objectivity. Both options leave intact the systemic oppression out of which the act arose, while failing to address the problems of injustice and its resulting violence.

Violence always breeds violence. Is it possible to interrupt the cycle? And does literature play a role in this age-old struggle? In a podcast last year for the New York Review of Books, Héctor Tobar sounds a rallying cry against oppression and injustice. He describes our current situation as a crisis of poetry. Daily, he observes, we witness the grim triumph of the rhetoric of rage and retribution, masks for domination and repression. What we need, Tobar declares, is poetry that offers new metaphors for justice and stories that inspire effective action for the common good. It’s time, Tobar argues, for our language to make credible and accessible the hope we need to survive, and the courage to act on that hope in solidarity with each other. Our verbal art can expose the bankruptcy of militant speech, offering new visions of collaboration. I hope we can rise to the challenge by writing stories and poems that unmask repression and aim toward justice for all.