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Reviewed by Raanan Geberer for Readers' Favorite
In At the Center by Dorothy Van Soest, Sylvia Jensen is a middle-aged, white social worker who works at a foster agency somewhere in “Indian Country.” When 5-year-old Anthony Little Eagle is found dead in the foster home where one of the agency’s social workers placed him, the authorities and the agency’s supervisors write it off as a tragic accident, but Jensen suspects otherwise. She soon finds herself in an unlikely partnership with J.B. Harrell, a super-confident, well-dressed and aggressive Native American reporter for a large local newspaper. They want to get to the bottom of the case – but can they without arousing too much suspicion? At the Center also has a sub-plot that takes place in the 1970s – about another Native American boy that gets placed with loving, supportive white foster parents, but with unexpected consequences. You’ll have to wait until the end of the book to see how the two plots intertwine.
In At the Center, Dorothy Van Soest is very successful in describing a world that many Americans who live in other parts of the country are unfamiliar with. She is adept at showing the relative poverty of the Indian community and the prejudice against it that survives to this day. She also shows us the day-to-day world of social case work – a world that most middle-class people rarely interact with. Her characters are real and believable. All in all, At the Center combines Van Soest’s depiction of a world that she, as a social worker and professor, is intimately familiar with, and all the ingredients of an exciting mystery novel.
