I was drawn to The Peacekeeper by B.L. Blanchard due to its setting. It takes place in modern time but in a world where the Americas were never colonized by Europeans. The story is about a young man whose mother is murdered by his father when he is a teenager. He spends the rest of his life caring for his sister who was twelve at the time of the murder. He eventually becomes a peacekeeper (what today we would call a policeman) and starts to investigate only the second murder in twenty years in his small town.
Due to what felt like heavy-handed foreshadowing, I suspected the murderer from the beginning. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. The world building is amazing. The story takes place among the Great Lakes. There is a map in the front of the book but with East at the top due to world view of the Anishinaabe tribe, the tribe of the main character and the tribe of which the author is an enrolled member. We learn how the criminal justice system in this world is based an restorative justice rather than punishment.
In addition to the culture and cities, we learn also about how communities and families work in this modern indigenous world. And the themes throughout the story touch on and explore these as well. This is more than a simple murder mystery set in an alternative world. It explores what it is like to live in that world and how people living there might deal with what happens around them. I would love to read more stories that take place in this world.
