Driven by a compulsion that challenges his self-control, the man calling himself Charles Milton prowls the rodeo circuit, hunting young women.

He chooses those he believes are the most vulnerable, wandering alone and distracted, before he strikes. For years, he has been meticulous in his methods, abducting, murdering, and disposing his victims while leaving no evidence of his crimes—or their identities—behind. Indigenous women have become his target of choice, knowing law enforcement’s history of ignoring their disappearances.

A cold case has just been assigned to Dan Pardee, a field officer with the newly formed Missing and Murdered Indigenous People’s Task Force. Rosa Rios, a young woman of Apache descent and one-time rodeo star, vanished three years ago. Human remains, a homicide victim burned beyond recognition, were discovered in Cochise County around the time she went missing. They have finally been confirmed to be Rosa. With Sheriff Joanna Brady’s help, Dan is determined to reopen the case and bring long-awaited justice to Rosa’s family. As the orphaned son of a murdered indigenous woman, he feels an even greater, personal obligation to capture this killer.

Joanna’s daughter Jennifer is also taking a personal interest in this case, having known Rosa from her own amateur rodeo days. Now a criminal justice major, she’s unofficially joining the investigation. And as it becomes clear that Rosa was just one victim of a serial killer, both Jennifer and Dan know they’re running out of time to catch an elusive predator who’s proven capable of getting away with murder.

In the nineties, a serial killer known as the Boxcar Killer roamed the West, hitching rides in empty boxcars and pushing Native Americans under moving trains. One of his victims, a Lakota named James, who was working in a rail yard in a small Oregon city, was pushed under a train and dragged for a mile and a half before the engineer was able to stop.

Law enforcement was called to the scene where James was pronounced dead, zipped into a body bag, and shipped off to the morgue which happened to be in the basement of the community hospital. One of the nurses, also a Lakota, knew James, so that evening when she got off shift, she went down to the morgue to wash his hair—a long standing Sioux tradition. When she unzipped the body bag, his arm came out because he wasn’t dead.

He went straight from the morgue to the OR for the first of the many surgeries that were required to duct tape his body back together. He ended up a paraplegic. He lost the use of his dominant arm and had to learn to use the other one. He had to learn how to speak again and how to read.

Some of his hospital stays were in a place where one of my friends was a volunteer, and before he was able to read again on his own, she read my books to him. And because she loved the Walker books, those were the first ones she read.

For the next twenty years, James worked with troubled urban Indian youth in the Portland area, helping them get back on “the right path.”

Shortly before his death in 2021, James called Loretta and said, “Tell your friend to write more Walker books. There there aren’t enough Indian heroes.” When James died, he was transported back to the reservation wrapped in a buffalo robe.

When it came time to write Blessing of the Lost Girls, a story of missing and murdered Indigenous girls, I did it in two months flat, beginning to end. It was as though writing that book was a sacred charge, and the story simply flowed because the spirit of a Lakota warrior was guiding every word.

JAJ