Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe’s Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack’s reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack’s estranged sister and Mitch’s former love. In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go—and what they will sacrifice—to win it all. But when an accident claims the life of Mitch’s mentor, a power broker in the reservation’s political scene, the election slides into chaos and pits Mitch against the only family he has.
Maintains a tight time frame, with each of its sections, apart from a brief postscript, devoted to a single day. This helps keep the book on the rails, given the numerous characters and events that fill its pages ... Such events drive the narrative forward, but despite the sound and fury, the novel has a strangely vacant center. This is not inadvertent ... Hickey’s writing can be workmanlike, even awkward ... For the most part, Big Chief cultivates an uneasy atmosphere. Full of cagey, terse, veiled exchanges between people bound together by self-interest who do not seem to like or trust each other much, it creates suspense not from the question of whether open conflict will take place, but when.
What Jon Hickey has created with Big Chief is a masterclass on identity and what it feels like to be at peace within our skin. There is power in those actions ... A dazzling, fast-paced pressure-cooker journey about not letting others define who we are, but rather deciding that for ourselves.
Ambitious ... Cynical and sly, with a pitiless eye for how identity gets deployed ... If the plot seems somewhat unsatisfying, perhaps that’s by design ... At its best, Big Chief illuminates the slushy places where convictions turn into slogans and back again. Hickey is so sure-footed that I’ll follow wherever he goes next.
