The Morning River

Through seven novels, most recently People of the Lightning, Gear (writing with Kathleen O'Neal Gear) has re-created the life of Native Americans of 2000 years ago. In his first solo hardcover, Gear moves ahead to 1825, intending, as he states in a foreword, to puncture current rosy ""myths"" about the Plains Indians. ""The people of the Plains,"" Gear says, ""took slaves, murdered women and children, committed genocide on their neighbors, and broke treaties."" This is revisionist, pedagogical fiction, then, and the narrative shows it not only through its luxuriant detail but also through lengthy expository speeches that impede narrative flow. Gear's lens on the past is Richard Hamilton, a petulant Harvard philosophy student who's sent by his father on business to St. Louis. There, Richard loses his father's bankroll and is sold as an indentured servant, spinning him into an adventure up the Mississippi that brings him up against frontiersfolk and Indians who are alike in nobility and depravity. Gear is a vigorous writer, and when he lets the often brutal action speak for itself, he tells a gripping tale, one to be continued in a sequel, Coyote Summer. (July)