The Story Teller (Wind River Reservation Series #4) »

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 an historian by trade, she is considered an expert on the Arapaho Indians.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act allows Indian tribes to recover sacred artifacts held in museums. Anxious to bring home their treasures, the Arapahos have asked Vicky Holden to handle everything. And to Vicky, it seems to be a routine case. Until the Arapaho storyteller confides that something is missing from the list: a rare and beautiful ledger book, a one-of-a-kind pictorial record and the only eye-witness account of Arapaho history on the plains. The book is worth millions to dealers who razor out pages and sell them one by one. But when the museum says they never even had the book, Vicky suspects foul play. Then she learns that an Arapaho student mysteriously died while researching the ledger. Vicky and Father John must begin a deadly search for the sacred treasure and the killer.

Publishers Weekly

Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden and reservation priest John O'Malley return in their taut fourth adventure (after The Dream Stalker, 1997). This time, they pursue those who will kill to find the missing "ledger book," a record in pictograph of Arapaho presence at an Army massacre of Indians in Colorado. Shortly after the tribe hires Holden to learn why the book apparently disappeared from a Denver museum collection, police find the body of an Arapaho graduate student, Todd Harris. To homicide detectives, Todd's murder looks like a soured drug deal. But Holden, knowing that the student was researching the subject of the ledger book, is convinced that the murder is connected to the book's disappearance. Father John, in Denver to comfort Harris's family, joins Holden in her search for the book. When two friends of Harris are murdered and the house where Holden stays is ransacked, the lawyer and the priest know that their own lives are in danger. All the strengths of this fine series are present here: Coel's knowledge of and respect for western history, a solid mystery with a credible premise in Indian lore and the struggles of Holden and O'Malley with their powerful, but so far unconsummated, attraction to each other. (Oct.) FYI: Berkley Prime Crime will simultaneously publish The Dream Stalker in paper.