Why I Write About the Missing

I need to say something plainly before anything else: the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis is not something my characters discovered. It is something Indigenous families and advocates have been documenting, fighting against, and demanding accountability for over generations. The crisis didn’t need a novel to make it real. It was real long before I wrote a word.

So why write about it?

Because fiction reaches people who don’t read policy reports. Because a character with a name and a history and a family can make a reader feel something that a statistic cannot. And because the silence around this crisis — the media silence, the institutional silence, the silence of a country that doesn’t look — is part of what sustains it.

Indigenous women in the United States face murder rates ten times the national average. When they disappear, investigations are often inadequate or nonexistent. Cases fall through jurisdictional gaps between tribal, state, and federal law enforcement. Families are left to become their own investigators. This is not backstory. This is the present.

The Bone Reader is a thriller. It has a plot, a detective, a villain, a moral dilemma that drives the story forward. But underneath the fiction, every systemic failure described in the book is drawn from documented reality — the underfunded tribal police, the jurisdictional cracks, the media silence, the families waiting decades for answers.

I’m not Indigenous. I’m a seventy-three-year-old white man from the Pacific Northwest. I don’t claim to speak for Indigenous communities. What I can do is use the tools I have — storytelling, a platform, a readership — to point toward a crisis that deserves more attention than it gets. The book includes an author’s note on the MMIW crisis and resources for organizations doing the real work.

If the novel makes one reader look up the statistics, support an Indigenous-led organization, or simply stop and think about who gets justice in this country and who doesn’t — that’s enough.

The Bone Reader is available  on Amazon.