I received this book for free from Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

When local girl Loren includes Mara in a traditional Blackfeet Giveaway to honor Loren’s missing sister, Mara thinks she’ll finally make some friends on the Blackfeet reservation.

Instead, a girl from the Giveaway, Samantha White Tail, is found murdered.

Because the four members of the Giveaway group were the last to see Samantha alive, each becomes a person of interest in the investigation. And all of them—Mara, Loren, Brody, and Eli—have a complicated history with Samantha.

Despite deep mistrust, the four must now take matters into their own hands and clear their names. Even though one of them may be the murderer.

Short and Sweet Review

Ever since her family has moved to the Blackfeet Reservation, Mara has been an outcast and not really included in things that the other kids her age are doing. When local Loren invite Mara to the traditional Blackfeet giveaway to honor her missing sister, Mara begins to think she’ll finally make some friends. Things quickly go awry when Samantha White Tail is found murdered. Mara, Loren and two others become suspects as they were the last ones to see Samantha alive. Each of the four is willing to investigate to prove their innocence.

In Looking for Smoke we have four main characters Mara, Loren, Brody, and Eli First Kill, and we get each of their POVs. Mara is an outcast but after Samantha is found dead she ends up spending more time with Loren, Brody, and Eli First Kill. Mara looks like a suspect because Samantha led the charge in encouraging everyone to ice her out and also people know about why Mara ended up moving the the reservation and that didn’t help her reputation. Loren’s older sister Rayanne went missing and she’s still dealing with the pain from that, so it doesn’t help when her best friend ends up murdered. Brody is more of a class clown type and he’s kind of a follower, just going along with what everyone says. Eli First Kill has a I don’t care attitude, but he’s also dealing with a lot more than people realize. After Samantha is found everyone realizes that there’s someone on the reservation murdering the girls. Mara and Loren are the ones doing most of the investigating and they just run ideas and timelines with the boys. Mara does end up having a but of a romance with Eli First Kill, I did enjoy it mainly because he has such a tough guy persona and we got to see her break down his walls. I did like how this book was inspired by the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement and it does bring awareness. I don’t think I’ve read a book with main characters who are Native American and I like learning about life on the reservation and also the movement. One thing I didn’t enjoy about this book was how it seemed that information would be brought up multiple times and it just seemed to be a cycle and we would see that with new information fingers would be pointed to someone else. Each chapter either had new information about the girls who have been murdered or it would give more of a characters background, there were also some chapters that were in a podcast type format which I enjoyed.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and the plot. I will say at some points it does get slow but it’s worth it to push through to the end because the ending was good and everything does get answered.