Margaret Coel

Margaret Coel (born October 11, 1937, in Denver, Colorado) is an American historian and mystery novelist. A fourth-generation Coloradan, she graduated in journalism from Marquette University in 1960 and worked as a reporter, including for the Boulder Daily Camera, before turning to book-length nonfiction history and, later, fiction. Her early books were histories of the American West and its Native peoples, among them Chief Left Hand, a biography of the Southern Arapaho leader, and Goin' Railroading, a study of the transcontinental railroad's construction crews.

That historical grounding carried directly into her fiction. Beginning with The Eagle Catcher in 1995, Coel wrote the twenty-book Wind River mystery series, following Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden and Jesuit priest Father John O'Malley as they investigate crimes on and around Wyoming's Wind River Reservation -- a long-running partnership built on the tension between Vicky's advocacy for her people and John's role within a church with its own fraught history among the Arapaho. Coel researched the reservation and its history directly, visiting regularly over the decades she wrote the series. She also wrote a shorter two-book series featuring Denver television reporter Catherine McLeod, and received multiple Colorado Book Awards and a WILLA Literary Award for her fiction.