By Dennis Fischman
When you write a mystery set in Indian country and it garners a recommendation from Tony Hillerman, you know you’ve done something right. When a reader sees that blurb (as I did, while visiting Colorado and browsing in Poor Richard’s Bookstore), well, you know you’ve got to read it.
Margaret Coel is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of the acclaimed novels featuring Father John O’Malley and Vicky Holden, as well as several works of nonfiction. Originally a historian by trade, she is considered an expert on the Arapaho Indians.
“The Lost Bird” by Margaret Coel.
Berkley Prime Crime, 1999.
In this book, #5 of the series, we have already met Father O’Malley, a baseball fan from Boston, originally sent to the mission at the Wind River Reservation to help him recover from his alcoholism and now committed to the place and the people around him. We also know about Vicky, an Arapaho woman who left a disastrous marriage and moved off the reservation to study and practice law. And we know there’s a star-crossed attraction between the two of them.
I agree with other reviewers who say this is the best of the first five books in the series. The well-established characters and relationships are deepened. The interweaving plots of
- a woman trying to find her birth parents (the “lost bird” of the title),
- an aging priest returning to the res to try to make amends and getting killed for his efforts, and
- the pollution of the groundwater causing a series of infant funerals thirty-five years earlier,
all come together in a brilliant way.
If you find you like the series, there are twenty entries in all. And if, like me, you find your appetite whetted for a mystery involving Native people that’s actually written by a Native author, join me in reading Blood Sisters by Vanessa Lillie this fall!