The Ghost Walker

October 2, 1996
In this second well-crafted adventure (after The Eagle Catcher), Father John O'Malley discovers a body dumped in a frozen ditch near his small church on the Arapaho reservation in Wyoming. His own truck disabled, Father John gets a ride from an edgy, evasive stranger. When police arrive at the snow-covered roadside, the body has vanished. The Arapahos say the ghost is walking around somewhere, causing trouble until the body is properly buried and the spirit can rest. Sure enough, Marcus Deppert, a troubled young Indian, disappears. His former girlfriend is murdered. Father John learns that the nervous stranger is living with two other men and the drug-using daughter of Vicky Holden, a lawyer and Father John's good friend. Worst of all for the priest, his superiors decide to sell the small reservation church to a shadowy investment group. Against a wintertime Wyoming to chill the bones, Coel skillfully meshes her story lines, offering a host of fine characters: the recovering alcoholic priest whose Jesuit logic often yields to his own weaknesses; his aged, Shakespeare-quoting mentor; and an Arapaho professional woman caught between white and Indian worlds.