Searching for Savanna

Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind is twenty-two and eight months pregnant when she disappears from her apartment block in Fargo, North Dakota, in August 2017. Seven days on, police arrest the white couple living on the floor above. They leave their apartment carrying a newborn, and the baby is Savanna's.

Her body is found days afterward. Mona Gable reports the case in full, from the search to the arrests to the trial.

The book's wider subject is what the case brought into view. Native American women and girls go missing or are killed at a high rate, and the cases often fall into gaps between tribal, state and federal authorities. Indigenous advocates have worked for a long time to have the problem treated as a crisis.

This is narrative non-fiction drawn from interviews, relatives' accounts and trial material. The focus remains on Savanna and the people who loved her, and the statistics are read as a very large number of individual cases like hers. The reporting is sober, and the book asks why so many of those cases go unanswered.