David Heska Wanbli Weiden: $100 a Bone

David Heska Wanbli Weidengrew up poor in Denver, in a household without money for books. He credits the Denver Public Library with saving him, in his words, and says it planted a dream of becoming a writer that took decades to reach. Neither of his parents went to college. He was the first in his family to go, and the road from there to novelist ran through law school, a PhD in political science, and years of teaching before he ever wrote fiction seriously. David talked about that path atThe Back Roomwhile introducingWisdom Corner, which published just five days before the event. The book is a standalone sequel toWinter Counts, which came out six years earlier and introduced Virgil Wounded Horse, a hired vigilante on the fictional version of the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where David is an enrolled citizen. Readers don't need to have read the first book to follow the second, though David said the backstory helps. The premise behind both books comes from something real. Under a federal law called the Major Crimes Act, tribal police, prosecutors, and courts can't prosecute felony crimes committed on their own land. Those cases have to go to the FBI and federal prosecutors instead, and David said the FBI declines to pursue roughly half of them, which means the people accused simply go free. That gap is part of what makes life genuinely harder on reservations, and it's also what pushes some people, in David's fiction and, he said, sometimes in reality, toward hiring someone like Virgil to deliver a different kind of justice. Virgil's price is exact. A hundred dollars a bone, a hundred a tooth, a hundred an eye.