http://dailycamera.com/news/2007/aug/31/lucky-13-margaret-coels-latest-myst
ery-is-one-of/

Margaret Coel's latest mystery is one of her best

By Clay Evans For the Camera
Friday, August 31, 2007

The Girl With the Braided Hair by Margaret Coel. Berkley Prime Crime, 293
pp. $23.95

In the early 1970s, the battle for American Indian rights was waged with
flashy, sometimes violent activism, including the takeover of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C., and the siege at Wounded Knee,
S.D.

But like so many other activist movements of the era, the high-profile push
for Indian rights soon faded. Instead of marches and militancy, advocates
turned to the courts and Congress in search of justice (whether or not
they've found it).

"The Girl With the Braided Hair," local author Margaret Coel's latest
mystery starring Father John O'Malley and Arapaho Indian lawyer Vicky
Holden, thoughtfully contrasts those two approaches even as it provides one
of the most taut, entertaining chapters in this now-venerable, 13-book
series.

The corpse at the heart of the mystery is a mere pile of bones, a long
black braid and a few tatters of clothing unearthed by animals on the Wind
River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, where both John and Vicky labor.

Who is she? Elder women of the tribe are concerned, and in the kind of
touch that makes Coel's mysteries as informative as they are entertaining,
they want to make sure she receives proper burial in "the Arapaho Way," so
her ghost won't walk the earth. The elders want Vicky and Father John, a
Jesuit and recovering alcoholic who has served St. Francis Mission for
almost a decade, to find her killer, cold as the trail may be.

As soon as forensic experts date the execution-style murder to 1973, the
"moccasin telegraph" starts humming with fear and memories of the bad — or
good — old days when members of the radical American Indian Movement fled
Wounded Knee and went into hiding among the Arapahos. Coel always brushes
her tales onto intriguing canvases, but never before one quite so
political. More than three decades on, reservation residents are still
debating whether AIM — which some tagged ignorant "city Indians" — had the
right approach.

"'What're whites ever gonna do for you?' they'd say. 'AIM's helping
people,'" recalls one character, an Indian woman who decided to become a
nurse, even at the risk of accusations that she had become "whiteized."
"And maybe there was some truth in it, I used to think. ... (But) some of
the AIM people were mean, they were violent."

More than ever before, Coel — who signs her work Wednesday at High Crimes —
makes the canvas integral to her story. For example, throughout the novel,
Vicky and her law partner (and lover, though their relationship remains
fragile), Adam Lone Eagle, happen to be working on a discrimination lawsuit
against Mammoth Oil, still carrying on the fight for Indian rights by other
means.

Once Vicky and Father John discover that the dead woman's name is Liz
Plenty Horses, their own digging begins to uncover the bones of the AIM
days. The girl with the braided hair, some say, was tagged an FBI snitch by
AIM activists, and she deserved what she got. Vicky follows the murdered
woman's trail to a former AIM safehouse in Denver, while Father John
pursues leads back on the rez. And as always, there's a killer still on the
loose, endangering the sleuths and other innocents.

Coel doesn't do anything without a reason in this novel. Readers who pay
attention to all the plot threads may develop a good guess about the
identity of the killer, but not too soon. In fact, the rhythm of revelation
in the novel feels just about perfect.

As always, fans of the series will enjoy checking in with Father John and
Vicky, who many installments ago resisted the temptation to act on their
mutual attraction. Will Vicky and Adam's relationship work out? And, in
something of a change up, Coel leaves Father John's future truly hanging on
the last page.

Although not a criticism, it is worth noting how often in Coel's novels
(especially here) the women — Indian, white, or whomever — live in a world
full of dangerous, unreliable, deceptive men, no matter their color. Father
O'Malley, a celibate (read: unthreatening) Catholic, is a good guy, and
others provide occasional exceptions, but even such a seeming ally as Adam
can come off as less than sympathetic. It's not a stretch to say that the
real dividing line in Coel's novels isn't one of race, but of sex; it'd be
interesting to know how her readership breaks out along gender lines.

That subtle bias even may have influenced the way Coel comes down on the
AIM debate. She's admirably evenhanded, but remember, the "chiefs" in the
movement were almost all men.

"The Girl With the Braided Hair," the 13th novel in this deeply satisfying
series, is anything but cursed. Complex, thoughtful and exciting, it's one
of Coel's best.