BIG CHIEF

A fixer for a Native American tribal leader is caught in the drama of a tense election season.

Mitch Caddo, the narrator of Hickey’s assured debut, is 30 years old and introduces himself as “the youngest ever tribal operations director for the Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe," a Wisconsin tribe with 5,000 enrolled members. It’s a step up from his previous work as a tribal attorney working family-court cases. But as the election for tribal president approaches, he’s torn: He knows that his old friend Mack Beck, the current president, who’s taken up residence in a suite at the local casino hotel, is an incompetent boor, and that Mack’s main political strategy—banishing and disenrolling those who fall into legal trouble and effectively paying off the tribe via annual checks from the general fund—at once weakens and alienates the community. As Mitch does disreputable things on Mack’s behalf, such as creating burner Facebook accounts smearing his opponent, Mitch is prompted to reconsider his past. Joe Beck, who’s the tribal counsel, Mack’s adoptive father, and a mentor to Mitch after his mother’s death, is disappointed in the mudslinging. Mack’s sister, Layla, with whom Mitch had a brief fling, is even more resentful. Keeping the timeframe tight—the story runs from Thanksgiving to the election the following Tuesday—escalates the intensity of a story that includes a plane crash, a community riot, hovering FBI agents, and a police department that’s much too comfortable using military surplus equipment. But most of the tension resides within Mitch, who enters the story with plenty of swagger—“I execute the decisions of a multi-million-dollar corporation that also happens to be a sovereign nation”—while slowly recognizing the perils of his braggadocio. It’s not hard to see the events in this small community as an allegory for larger themes of corruption in the Trump era, but Hickey avoids big symphonic flourishes and instead emphasizes the cost to individuals.

A big-minded book about small-town politics.