Dakota
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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 Indian girl missing for several months, turns up dead in a snowbank with a mysterious brand on her forearm. The sheriffâwhose romantic relationship with Lola provides Magpie with its most delicious gossip in yearsâthinks Judith probably froze to death while hitchhiking 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 lifeâespecially her ownâis 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.
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Gwen Florio is a veteran journalist who has covered stories ranging from the shootings at Columbine High School and the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, to the glitz of the Miss America pageant and the more practical Miss Navajo contest. She has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, as well as Lost Springs, Wyoming (population three). She has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; her short fiction, for the Pushcart.
Caroline Shaffer is an AudioFile Earphones Awardâwinning narrator. A former company member at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for nineteen years, she received an MFA from the American Conservatory Theater.
