The searchers

LISSA YELLOW BIRD KNOWS something about how to find a body in the badlands of North Dakota. To outsiders, the landscape might appear empty and unchanging, but to Yellow Bird, it looks dynamic — different in every season. She is attuned to how April’s snowmelt washes away sediment and carves rivulets into the land; to the way the heavy rains in the fall can erase tracks; to how the winter’s snow can bring new shapes into relief. “The land would reveal what it wanted to us,” journalist Sierra Crane Murdoch recalls Yellow Bird explaining. “The point was not to force the land to give up the body but to be there when it did.”

For eight years, Yellow Bird has helped grieving family members search for missing relatives. In her sprawling and richly detailed debut book, , Murdoch, a former contributing editor, tells the story of Yellow Bird’s first search.