-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
by Gwen Florio
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 girl missing for several months, turns up dead in a snowbank with a mysterious brand on her forearm. The sheriff - whose romantic relationship with Lola provides Magpie with its most delicious gossip in years - thinks Judith probably froze to death while hitch-hiking 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 life - especially her own - is 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.
"Starred Review. Florio succeeds with her second riveting Lola title (after Montana). Occasionally her character's knee-jerk reactions wear thin, but the hard-nosed feminine perspective is refreshing. " - Library Journal
"Disappointing...her plot quickly turns improbable, her villains and victims rapidly flatline into caricature, and her conclusion boils over into soggy cliché" - Publishers Weekly
"Despite Lola's rash tendency to engage in risky behavior when acting as an amateur sleuth, the writing is top-notch, and the action builds at just the right pace." - Kirkus
This information about Dakota was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Award-winning journalist Gwen Florio has covered stories ranging from the shooting at Columbine High School to the glitz of the Miss America pageant and the more practical Miss Navajo contest, whose participants slaughter and cook a sheep. She's reported from Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, as well as Lost Springs, Wyoming (population three). She turned to fiction in 2013 with the publication of her first novel, Montana, which won the Pinckley Prize for Debut Crime Fiction and a High Plains Book Award. Four more novels followed in the Lola Wicks series, termed "gutsy" by the New York Times. She is also the author of Silent Hearts and Best Laid Plans (2021).
Florio lives in Missoula, Montana, with her partner, Scott Crichton, and an exuberant, manuscript-chewing bird dog named Nell. She is...
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
