Margaret Coel's latest mystery is one of her bestAs 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."Comment: A body in the wilderness, a decades-old mystery, unreliable male characters, a killer you can guess...it sounds a lot like
The Spirit Woman.
2 comments:
I have long tried to get people to stay away from the Margaret Coel Series because of its mostly inaccurate representations of my tribe, my reservation, and our situation there.
I am writing an article about that which I have began to post on my own blog. It covers "Eye of the Wolf" and goes into the series itself. Find it here:
http://redshade-report.blogspot.com/
I read your review...interesting.
I haven't read Eye of the Wolf, but it sounds similar to the two Coel mysteries I have read. I suspect all her books have the same strengths and weaknesses.
I look forward to your comments on the entire series.
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