This article first appeared in The Kansas City Star on November 12, 2025. 

The 'Mask of the Deer Woman' author conversation is scheduled for 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 18, at the Plaza Branch, 4801 Main St. It’s free with RSVP. Join the KC Pop-up Book Group on Wednesday, Dec. 3, also at the Library's Plaza Branch. RSVP here. 

A lot is at stake on novelist Laurie Dove’s fictional Oklahoma reservation. 

For instance, Tribal Marshal Starr will lose her job — and possibly her mind — if she can’t locate Chenoa Cloud. Starr couldn’t save her own daughter’s life, but finding someone else’s girl alive may help her heal.

However, each time the marshal visits the girl’s mother and grandmother for more information or to update them about the missing person case, a decorative mask trips her up. She swears the mask’s rigid material moves and changes until the room tilts and she nearly vomits. 

In Mask of the Deer Woman, Dove said that the mask is a “visual representation of a deep and resonant history, and not only that, but a future. These aren’t stories that are happening in the past, these are stories that continue to happen and will continue to happen in the future.” 

The Wichita-area debut novelist said the numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous girls and women are both staggering and acknowledged to be inaccurately reported — on the low side. By the highest counts, as many as 5,800 Indigenous women and girls are currently unaccounted for. 

And, Dove pointed out, most of those women did not live on reservations at the time of their disappearance, so “it is an every-person issue in every location.” 

The situation on Dove’s Saliquaw Reservation reflects those numbers and some of the stories, but in this case, the broken and complicated character of Starr quickly becomes determined to connect the dots and close some cold cases.

Mask of the Deer Woman is the current KC Pop-up Book Group pick and rich in talking points. Dove’s narrative runs beneath a pile-up of challenges and smart dualities, like the ones represented by the mask that plagues Starr. 

“Deer Woman felt to Starr like the embodiment of the one thing Starr believed: that enforcing the law and carrying out justice were very different,” Dove wrote. 

Legend has it, according to the novel, that Deer Woman carries different outcomes to different people. That is, she’s a solution — such as offering a way forward to someone who is lost — for those who do no harm, but she delivers swift retribution to those who are cruel. 

And Starr doesn’t know which category she falls into. 

For years, she had a successful career as a Chicago detective, but when her daughter died after getting caught up in something dangerous, Starr was “face to face with the idea that this went from the theoretical way that she did her job to suddenly grappling with: What does justice really look like?” Dove said. 

And exactly how Starr enacted justice is what makes her uncertain about where she stands with Deer Woman. They have several encounters before that’s clear. 

The author, who worked as a journalist for decades prior to publishing this novel, the first in a trilogy, is also of Indigenous heritage and the mother of five daughters. 

Dove said she liked giving Starr so much complexity — she’s seen the protector and avenger come out in herself and the women around her. 

“It’s fiction, but it gives me a new way to kind of explore some of these intersections and intricacies that are the human condition,” Dove said. 

She has been surprised at the conversations that arise once readers layer their own meaning over hers. “It feels like being in community with a greater humanity, and it is the ultimate experience of my life.”

Meet the author 

The Mask of the Deer Woman conversation between Laurie Dove and the Library's Anne Kniggendorf is at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, November 18, at the Plaza Branch, 4801 Main St. It’s free with RSVP. 

Join the KC Pop-up Book Group 

The Kansas City Star partners with the Kansas City Public Library to present a book-of-the-moment selection. We invite the community to read along. Kaite Mediatore Stover, the Library’s director of Readers’ Services, will lead a discussion of Laurie Dove’s Mask of the Deer Woman at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 3, at the Library’s Plaza Branch, 4801 Main St. Email Stover at kaitestover@kclibrary.org to join or RSVP.