Ghost Walker (Wind River Reservation Mystery) - Hardcover

Coel, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0425154688 ISBN 13: 9780425154687

Publisher: Berkley Hardcover, 1996

Synopsis

When Father John O'Malley returns to investigate another murder near the Arapaho Indian mountains, he is shocked to discover that the body he had seen in the snow the previous night has vanished, leaving only suspicion and doubt behind as evidence.

About this title

About the Author

Margaret Coel is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of The Thunder Keeper, The Spirit Woman, The Lost Bird, The Story Teller, The Dream Stalker, The Ghost Walker, The Eagle Catcher, and several works of nonfiction. She has also authored many articles on the people and places of the American West. Her work has won national and regional awards. Her first John O'Malley mystery, The Eagle Catcher, was a national bestseller, garnering excellent reviews from the Denver Post, Tony Hillerman, Jean Hager, Loren D. Estleman, Stephen White, Earlene Fowler, Ann Ripley and other top writers in the field. A native of Colorado, she resides in Boulder.

Reviews

In this second well-crafted adventure (after The Eagle Catcher), Father John O'Malley discovers a body dumped in a frozen ditch near his small church on the Arapaho reservation in Wyoming. His own truck disabled, Father John gets a ride from an edgy, evasive stranger. When police arrive at the snow-covered roadside, the body has vanished. The Arapahos say the ghost is walking around somewhere, causing trouble until the body is properly buried and the spirit can rest. Sure enough, Marcus Deppert, a troubled young Indian, disappears. His former girlfriend is murdered. Father John learns that the nervous stranger is living with two other men and the drug-using daughter of Vicky Holden, a lawyer and Father John's good friend. Worst of all for the priest, his superiors decide to sell the small reservation church to a shadowy investment group. Against a wintertime Wyoming to chill the bones, Coel skillfully meshes her story lines, offering a host of fine characters: the recovering alcoholic priest whose Jesuit logic often yields to his own weaknesses; his aged, Shakespeare-quoting mentor; and an Arapaho professional woman caught between white and Indian worlds.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A veteran writer of nonfiction on the West, Coel introduced Father John O'Malley previously in The Eagle Catcher (1995); here, in the second of what may become a series, another mystery is engagingly constructed around the professional (and personal) trials of O'Malley, leader of the St. Francis Mission to the Wind River Indian Reservation in winter-blasted Wyoming. This time there's enough violence, addiction, and incipient romance to keep more than one spiritual advisor on military alert. Father John discovers and then loses track of a body in a ditch. Subsequently, a business cartel threatens to close the Mission; the daughter of the tribal lawyer--a lovely ``woman alone'' and proven ally named Vicky Holden--comes home with a drug habit in the company of strange men; and two jobless braves go missing. Not to mention that the clerical Toyota pickup is blindsided. Father John is a recovering alcoholic; he prevails one day at a time, emptying a whiskey bottle into the Wind River, locating the murderer, and even finding a way to fund Arapaho basketball. Coel's inoffensive series (or series-to-be) in the Hillerman tradition finds a space where Jesuits and Native Americans can meet in a culture of common decency. The stories could benefit from a less polite tone and less attention to the minutiae of food, clothing, and--in this case, cold--weather. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Coel's second mystery featuring Father John O'Malley, parish priest for St. Francis Mission on the Arapaho reservation in Wyoming, is a corking good read. It starts with a bang when Father John, his ancient Toyota broken down, has to walk for help and finds a dead man in a ditch on a remote, snowy road. By the time the priest has found a phone and the police reach the scene, the body has disappeared--a ghost walker, according to the Arapahos, doomed to wander trying to find the path to the sky world and raising hell while he does. And indeed, that is what happens when Father John learns that the mission complex is scheduled to be sold and redeveloped with a huge recreational center to attract tourists, and that the son of two of his oldest parishioners has disappeared. Coel's Catholic Irish Jesuit priest and his Arapaho friends and neighbors, each with individual worldviews and sensibilities, make for interesting contrasts in this excellent mystery that focuses on the strange place Native Americans occupy in their own land. An outstanding entry in a superior series. Stuart Miller

Edition details

• Publisher: Berkley Hardcover
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0425154688
• ISBN 13: 9780425154687
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 243