Last Ride

Eidson seems to have come a cropper with this second book in a trilogy about the American frontier, which follows his widely praised debut, St. Agnes' Stand. Regurgitating a timeworn theme, the story opens in the New Mexico territory of the late 1880s, as the terminally ill Samuel Jones shows up on the doorstep of his daughter Maggie, seeking to make amends. She refuses to acknowledge him, however: 30 years earlier, Jones, a white man, had abandoned his family to live with an Apache squaw. Soon after Jones's appearance, Maggie's daughter Lily is kidnapped by the Lame One, a grotesquely deformed Apache witch. The ensuing-seemingly endless-pursuit across the desert is marked by repetitive clashes between the God-fearing Maggie and her father over his efforts to convert Maggie's younger daughter, Dot, to his pagan Indian sorcery. Numerous Indian spirits, unsurprising brushes with death and a maudlin reconciliation are but a few of the burdensome elements that ultimately swamp this hackneyed effort, which not even Eidson's impressive observations on desert ornithology can rescue. (Mar.)