`The Silent Spirit' Is 14th In `Wind River' Series

(AP)  "The Silent Spirit" (Berkley, 322 pages, $24.95), by Margaret Coel: In 1923, Tim McCoy, a real-life cowboy turned Hollywood actor, recruited 300 Shoshone and Arapaho Indians to appear as extras in an epic silent movie, "The Covered Wagon."

In "The Silent Spirit," Margaret Coel's re-imagining of this true story, one Arapaho brave never returns home to the desolate Wind River reservation in Wyoming.

It was thought that Charlie Wallowingbull just ran off to find a better life; but three generations later, his family still doesn't believe that's what happened.

Enter Charlie's great-grandson, Kiki Wallowingbull, just released from prison on a drug-dealing charge. Kiki's gone straight, or so he says, and he's obsessed with discovering the truth behind the disappearance of the grandfather he never knew.

But before long, Kiki's frozen body, the skull bashed in, turns up on the banks of the Little Wind River.

The FBI agent assigned to the case dismisses it as a drug deal gone bad. Father John O'Malley, who runs the reservation's Jesuit mission, and Vicky Holden, an Arapaho lawyer, aren't so sure. First independently, and then together, they poke into the case.

This is the 14th book in Coel's "Wind River" series, each featuring the adventures of O'Malley and Holden on the Wyoming reservation. This one gets off to a slow start, but give it a chance and the story grows on you as the pair struggles to solve both a new murder and an old mystery.

"The Silent Spirit" is a story entwined with forbidden love, with Charlie's disappearance related to his dalliance with a white actress, and with the Irish priest and the Arapaho lawyer still trying to fight off their mutual sexual attraction.

Because her books are set on a western Indian reservation, Coel often finds herself compared to Tony Hillerman, who wrote a series of brilliant crime novels about Navaho tribal policemen Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn.

Coel's prose, although very good, isn't as lyrical and evocative as Hillerman's, but there won't be anymore Chee and Leaphorn novels. The Mystery Writers of America Grand Master died last year.

For readers hungering for more stories written in the same spirit, Coel is the next-best thing.