Buffalo Bill's Dead Now by Margaret Coel

 

One of a small handful of mystery series I'll read books from, in any order I find them. Ms. Coel's empathy for the Arapahoes of Wind River is deep and occasionally borders on heartbreaking. This has an interesting structural fillip, in that the instigating event is a theft, not a murder--though there is eventually a murder to solve. There's an ongoing tension here that I remember being strong enough in a later novel to strongly imply that one of her mains is going to find himself unable to continue being a Roman Catholic priest, though here it's much less overt. The characters are different and believable, and the story is distressingly plausible, though Ms. Coel does unpack in her afterword/acknowledgments where her fiction departs from reality. I'll keep reading more of these novels as I keep finding them, probably.