Maskwa - Paperback

by Johnny Cole (Author)

She's spent twenty years running from her past. Now it's her only way to alter her future.

The weather no longer behaves, and neither does the regime. Alaska Rainmaker rides the backroads as a bounty hunter - motorcycle, lasso, and a "lightning spirit" that won't let her rest.

When a killer at large starts wearing the masks of history's most notorious murderers, Alaska and her detective father team up - reluctantly, then completely - with the help of their freedom-seeking robot sidekick. They dig deeper into the shifting cultural and political undercurrents of America, through a chosen family of misfits who refuse to be flattened: podcasters and revolutionaries, cosplayers and musicians, grandmothers and old-school cops, museum curators and fetish aficionados, lovers who can't quite quit each other.

As they track the case deeper into the labyrinth, old wounds and older evils start to look like the same thing. Alaska's own theories about ancient forces at work put her at odds with her father's need for hard evidence - until the line between the two stops being so clear.

Blending ancestral memory, cyberpunk aesthetics, climate fiction, and a hard-boiled crime narrative, Maskwa is Indigenous futurism at its most visceral. It's a story about bear medicine and rainbow prophecies, chosen family and shapeshifting identities, and becoming courageous in the twilight of empire, where the fight for survival and justice turns out to be, all along - a fight to remember what we never stopped being: related.

Over 340 pages of Indigenous futurism, climate fiction, and heart-pounding rebellion.