For your Minnesota spring reading list, here are two novels that coincidentally involve foster children as well as an adventure with cadaver dogs.

“Broken Fields” >> by Marcie Rendon (Soho Crime, $28.95)

Cash ran through the whole list of folks she wanted to damn to hell as she got back into the Ranchero and drove away. Social workers who took kids and put them in ‘good’ homes where kids were made to do adult field work or clean entire houses while biological children watched Saturday morning cartoons. Kids beaten for minor infractions of rules that were never fully explained until some foster parent exploded in rage. She damned to hell all the foster mothers and fathers of homes where she herself had lived. — from “Broken Fields”

Cash Blackbear is back in Marcie Rendon’s fourth mystery featuring the tough-as-nails young Ojibwe woman who sometimes helps Sheriff Wheaton solve murder cases in the Red River Valley around Fargo-Moorhead in the 1970s.

Cash, who loves being outdoors, is plowing a field in spring when she sees a car with the motor running at a nearby farmhouse. Hours later the car is still there. When she investigates she finds two dead men and a frightened little girl curled under the bed.

The men are identified as the white owner of the farm who is renting to the other man, the Indian father of the little girl named Shawnee. The child, who looks like a young version of Cash with her big brown eyes, is so traumatized she is mute. What happened in that farmhouse and what did the girl see? Where is her mother? Cash, who has the gift of “knowing things” sometimes, senses the child’s mother is on the run because she fears she will be accused of the killings. Cash feels for the little girl, who is taken as a foster child by the widow of the murdered farmer. But gossip comparing the town to Peyton Place leads folks to wonder if the grieving widow is really such a God-fearing Christian woman.

As Wheaton searches for the child’s mother, Cash heads to the White Earth reservation where she suspects the woman is hiding. There she connects with her mysterious old Ojibwe friend Jonesy, who also has the power to see the invisible. Several times Jonesy’s spirit appears on the passenger seat when Cash is driving, offering advice and then disappearing.

“Broken Fields” has everything readers have loved in Rendon’s Cash Blackbear series since the first, “Murder on the Red River,” was published in 2021. There’s a taut plot, plenty of fast-paced excitement, a touch of the supernatural, and poetic writing about the prairie and its animal inhabitants.

Then there’s Cash, who was 19 when the series began. She survives by doing field work and making a little money shooting pool at the local watering hole, always underestimated by her male opponents. She drinks too much beer, smokes too much, and doesn’t hesitate to take a cue stick to a guy who’s insulting her. She takes foolish chances sometimes, but she is tenacious when she’s helping others she cares about. In “Broken Fields” she lies by omission about Shawnee and her mother to her mentor Sheriff Wheaton and it takes time for them to get back to their old, easy relationship. (Rendon has a little fun describing silent communication through dirty looks between Cash and the sheriff’s dog Gunnar, who has saved Cash’s life but doesn’t like her.)

It’s not a spoiler to reveal the conclusion of “Broken Fields” assures us Cash will be back.

Rendon, who lives in Minneapolis, is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation. Besides writing fiction she is also a playwright, poet, freelance writer and community arts activist. She will launch “Broken Fields” with a free reading at 6 p.m. March 4 at Once Upon a Crime mystery bookstore, 604 W. 26th St., Mpls.

“The Good Samaritan” >> by Toni Halleen (Harper, $18.99)

‘Sure,’ I said, thinking about all the negligent things I’d just done. I lifted and carried a passed-out kid without checking first for injury. I drove said kid while tipsy. I didn’t lock the car, which made it easier for him to jump out. Slammed on the brakes, jarring him. Had he hit his head? Grabbed his shoulder, then let him run away into a dark field. Hmm. — from “The Good Samaritan”

There is so much emotion in Toni Halleen’s new novel a reader will feel sympathy for the four characters in a story set in the fall of 1992 when the lives of Matthew, Claire, Kira and Seaver come together.

Matthew Larkin is a sociology professor at a Minnesota private college in a town much like Northfield. It’s been eight years since Matthew’s 4-year-old son Finn drowned in a neighbor’s swimming pool. Matthew was caretaker that day and his wife blamed him, leading to divorce. He spends weekends with their teenage daughter, Claire, who felt neglected after her little brother died. She’s having problems involving a boy in her biology class.

On a cold, gloomy night Matthew finds a little boy named Seaver hidden under a tarp outside a closed business. Without thinking too clearly, he puts the boy in his car thinking he’d drop the child at the nearby hospital so the police don’t find out he’d been drinking. But the boy runs into the night, which brings compassionate social worker Kira into the story as she searches for the 12-year-old foster child. Kira feels special sympathy for the boy because she was a foster child who grew up in the relatively happy home of a farm couple with whom she still visits and where Seaver was staying. Something happened at the farm that made him run away.

Seaver keeps popping up in Matthew’s life. The professor drives the boy to Minneapolis to find his drug-addicted mother. Matthew has a second chance at earning tenure, but his decisions to help Seaver open legal consequences for him and the college when the police interrupt a seminar he’s hosting in his apartment where he is serving liquor to students.

What’s gripping about this story is the characters’ emotional ties. Matthew and Claire try to work out their father-daughter relationship, remembering the fun they had before Finn’s death, for which Matthew feels guilt and sorrow. Scenes of him visiting his son’s grave are especially touching. Seaver is part smart little thief and part lonely boy. Kira is the tough but gentle center of the story. We sympathize with Matthew, who doesn’t seem to realize how creepy his actions seem to outsiders, for Claire, whose unwanted sexual encounter is told in two pages of insightful writing, and for Kira, whose big heart is open to all troubled kids.

Toni Halleen worked as an employment law attorney, earning her law degree at the University of Minnesota. She runs the Minneapolis-based law firm Schaefer Halleen. Her debut novel, “The Surrogate,” was published in 2021 to good reviews. Halleen is also an improviser who uses her stage experience to develop and teach Think On the Spot skills to hundreds of professionals.

Halleen will launch “The Good Samaritan” at 7 p.m. March 3 at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls. Registration required at magersandquinn.com. She’ll read at 2 p.m. March 9 at Big Hill Books, 405 Penn Ave. S., Mpls. Registration required at bighillbooks.com.

“The Second Grave” >> by Jeffrey B. Burton (Severn House, $29.99)

Tests indicate a cadaver dog’s nose can alert to the scent of human remains as deep as forty feet underground, with ten to fifteen feet being child’s play. Yup — it’s freaking supernatural. And I’ve trained Alice and Rex to detect the scent not only in bodies but in blood, in teeth, in hair… and in bone. — from “The Second Grave”

If you’re reading a book mixing cadaver dogs and crime, it’s probably by Jeff Burton, who’s written three books in the Mace Reid K-9 mysteries series. “The Second Grave” is the second in his Chicago K-9 thriller series after “The Dead Years.”

The Chicago thrillers feature college student and sometime dog obedience trainer Cory Pratt, who lives with his sister Crystal Pratt, an investigator in the violent crimes section of the Chicago police department. Cory’s constant companions are his dogs trained to find bodies — Alice, a grave bloodhound, and Rex, a happy springer spaniel.

Cory and the dogs are called out by Crystal to search for a missing elderly man in Kankakee River State Park outside of Chicago. They find him dead, but the dogs also detect what turns out to be two graves with three bodies in one grave and one body in another. Who are these men? Are they connected to a bank robbery that took place years earlier? And why are there separate graves?

Crystal and her team find the corpses’ identities, discovering that one is related to Chicago’s mob boss, who would kill the perps if he found out who they were. That puts Crystal and her team in danger.

The story toggles between Crystal’s investigation and what happened decades earlier when the men planned and pulled off the bank robbery. Past and present come together smoothly in the story, in which the two dogs play a critical role.

Burton, who lives in St. Paul, also writes the Agent Drew Cady thrillers, including the widely praised “The Eulogist.”