People of the Mist

November 3, 1997
The eighth in a series of popular novels about precolonial North America (People of the Wolf; People of the Fire; etc.) concerns the Algonquins who inhabited the Chesapeake Bay area 600 years ago. Once the villagers of Flat Pearl decide to seek an alliance with their former enemy, the Great Tayac Copper Thunder, their crafty headwoman arranges to seal the peace by arranging a marriage between him and her granddaughter Red Knot. On the day Red Knot must leave with Tayac, she is found murdered in the nearby forest, and her secret lover, High Fox (the scion of a rival village made uneasy by the pending alliance), is a prime suspect. A girl from his own village, Sun Conch, is in love with High Fox and goes to the sorcerer-hermit Panther for help in acquitting him. In what is essentially a detective story, the Panther decides to visit different warring villages to discover the murderer. Though the novel suffers from a jarring, extraneous introduction meant to dramatize abuses of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, simple prose brightened by atmospheric detail sweeps this fluid, suspenseful mix of anthropological research and character-driven mystery to a solid, satisfying resolution.