The Story Teller

A sturdy mystery, with more interesting themes underpinning the character motivations.

Centered around a missing Arapaho ledger book, and a history student, this mystery gets into the gray nexus of cultural ownership and the monetary value tied to both artifacts themselves, and what they reveal about past events. This nexus includes political ramifications with regards to land grants, professional ramifications for museums and historians, and material ramifications in that all of the above are worth a great deal of money. The Sand Creek massacre hovers over this story like a heavy silence.

I could really do without the constant reminder that heroine Vicky and hero Father John care about each other *very much*. I get it, can we focus on show more the dead people and complex web of history's influence on the present now? show less

I like this series with Father John O'Malley and Vicky Holden. She is asked to look into recovering tribal artifacts from a Denver museum. Centered around a missing Arapaho ledger book, and a history student, this mystery illuminates search for power, money interests and culture. The plot is fascinating and well-mapped. The characters are well developed and believable. Most of the book is set in Colorado...off the Wind River reservation. I'll willingly go to book #5 in the series.

Father John and Vicky find themselves once again working on a murder. This time a young graduate student who has promised to be curator at the Arapaho Museum is killed while finishing up his master's thesis. Is there something in the thesis that got him killed? Or was it a drug related killing? Vicky and Father John both dismiss the drug angle, they know Todd and that isn't his style.

At first I thought this was going to be another "big issue" book, i.e., something that involves several federal agencies as well as the local police. There were some aspects of this but it wasn't the main part of the story, it stayed as a mostly local story, which I like much better.

I like the blend of Arapaho traditions blending with modern life and with show more the Catholic traditions. It is an unusual blend and Coel carries it off time after time.

More books to read in this series so I'll be back on the Wind River Reservation, soon. show less

Artifacts are being returned by museums to tribes via a government act, but an inventory missing the ledger is what drew attorney Vicky Holden to Denver where the murder occurred. Father John O'Malley is on the campus of Regis University in Denver to try to secure funding for a museum. Meanwhile a graduate student from the Wind River Reservation is murdered and his death seems to be linked to his thesis.Father John and Vicky assist investigators in finding the perpetrators, but the way they reach their conclusions holds the reader's interest. I listened to the audio book read by Stephanie Brush who does a good job with this series.

I like this series with Father John O'Malley and Vicky Holden. She is asked to look into recovering tribal artifacts from a Denver museum. An elderly story teller recalls seeing an extremely valuable ledger written by a warrior present at Sand Creek at the museum in 1920 but the museum denies it ever existed. Holder with the help of Father John uncover a plot to steal the ledger and the death of 3 young native americans. including a young man who was working on this thesis and hoped to develop a museum on the reservation. He is the one may have discovered the existence of the ledger, but he is killed before he can talk to anyone about it.

A young historian, who seems to have found a rare Arapaho document in a museum that now denies its existence, is murdered and a lawyer and her friend, a Catholic priest on the Wind River Reservation, are convinced it's not the drug-related killing the police seem to think. Some good elements here, though the narrative style didn't quite work for me.

Jesuits, Native American. I like it. I didn't quite engage, though, until I realized it was a analogy of a spiritual journey.

Part of the problem was I just didn't really believe in the story. John Irving has one of his characters, a writer, ask "Did you believe my story?" and when someone says no, he asks "Where did you stop believing? At what point in the story?" I watch now for my own belief, where it begins and ends, and this one, oddly enough, began late.