The Lost Bird - Hardcover

Margaret Coel is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of The Thunder Keeper, The Spirit Woman, The Lost Bird, The Story Teller, The Dream Stalker, The Ghost Walker, The Eagle Catcher, and several works of nonfiction. She has also authored many articles on the people and places of the American West. Her work has won national and regional awards. Her first John O'Malley mystery, The Eagle Catcher, was a national bestseller, garnering excellent reviews from the Denver Post, Tony Hillerman, Jean Hager, Loren D. Estleman, Stephen White, Earlene Fowler, Ann Ripley and other top writers in the field. A native of Colorado, she resides in Boulder.

Father John Aloysius O'Malley is a Jesuit priest on an Arapaho reservation. John had wanted to teach college or University but after falling to alcohol and recovering he found it impossible to find an institution that wanted him. That is how he ended up on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming trying to redeem himself. Helping him out for the last two weeks is Father Joseph Keenan, who should be retired (he is seventy-two with a serious heart condition) but who has instead returned to the reservation where he had been a pastor in the 1960s. The mission gets a phone call that someone is dying and needs the last rites performed. Joseph takes John's truck and heads out to the house even though John argues that he should take the call and allow the older man to rest. Joseph is shot getting out of the truck. Was he the intended victim or John? Vicky Holden is a lawyer who, as well as trying to help figure out this mystery, is trying to help the popular movie star Sharon David to find her parents. Sharon was adopted and thinks that, although she has light skin, perhaps her biological parents were from this reservation. Vicky has trouble proving this for two reasons; 1) adoption to an outside family rarely occurred on the reservation and 2) the year that Sharon was born was the year that many babies died and therefore there would not have been any adoptions. Vicky and John who are friends come together to figure out these two mysteries and a few others that they stumble upon on their way. The Lost Bird was a great mystery, especially as events start to come to light. It was a book where you had to figure out who and why as you read along. Margaret Coel did a great job of tying up a lot of loose ends in a logical, exciting and enjoyable manner. You end up feeling a lot of empathy for the characters and their situations. Pick this one up, you'll enjoy it. The Lost Bird is an engrossing mystery and a great read! Margaret Coel manages to have enjoyable characters and a super mystery - not an easy task. Michelle Sawyer -- Copyright © 1999 Literary Times, Inc. All rights reserved -- From Literary Times