Waiting for the other shoe to drop? Well, here comes. I haven't until now read any of her novels, and I tried Sky Coyote without having read her first novel, In the Garden of Iden. I had noticed, however, that even in her short stories there were hints of a larger story arc, involving questions about the real motives of the 24th-century owners of the Company, about the real status of the Immortals who work for them, and about some mysterious events in the future. These are interesting hints, and they promise a pretty good story somewhere along the line. But in some of the stories, and most especially in the novel at hand, they are frustrating distractions from the immediate storyline: frustrating because they sometimes presume knowledge only attainable by reading the other stories and novels in the series; frustrating because they often have little connection to the main storyline; and frustrating because they remain unresolved.

Sky Coyote is told by the Immortal Joseph, a Facilitator for the Company who has been working for them for thousands of years. His new assignment, in 1700 A.D., is to appear to a town full of Chumash Indians in (what will become) California, as a figure from their legends: Sky Coyote. He is to persuade them to pack up their town, lock, stock and canoe, and be transported away to the future. You see, their culture is about to be destroyed by the white men -- first Spanish missionaries; eventually the Americans -- and the Company wishes to preserve as much of this culture as possible for restoration or at least study in the 24th century. (Why and how they make a profit doing so, is not ever convincingly explained, but let that pass.)

This makes for an enjoyable story. There is a lot of interesting detail about the impressively advanced Chumash culture, including their commercial nature, and their stories and legends. Joseph as Sky Coyote gets to make a lot of jokes, and have a lot of sex. There isn't quite enough conflict, and the plot isn't twisty enough, but the basic story is still worth reading.

However, Baker intersperses this with some other details. Events in Joseph's past life, some of which raise doubts in him about the Company. A lot of focus on an otherwise thoroughly minor character named Mendoza (who is, I gather, the protagonist of both In the Garden of Iden and the recently released third book in the series, Mendoza in Hollywood). A few strange intimations of something portentous occurring in 2355 A.D. All this is really quite interesting. The problem is, it's really not got much of anything to do with the rest of the novel, and it serves mainly as a distraction. The main story is a bit thin anyway, and the hints of some really interesting stuff that we'll get to eventually don't help.

Make no mistake about it: Baker has the chops of a fine writer. Her characters are well drawn, her prose is sound, her stories hold the reader's interest. And whatever misgivings I have, I still enjoyed Sky Coyote. But I think it's seriously flawed structurally by the intrusion of an external story arc that is presented only by hints. (Series with overall story arcs are common, of course, and can work very well. But the overall story arcs should be accompanied by an equally strong individual story, and the external story should be better integrated with the story at hand, and, I think, a bit more intermediate closure should be available in any individual novel of a series relative to the overall story.) In the final analysis, this novel will mainly be of interest to readers committed to the entire series, and even those readers will probably find themselves chomping at the bit for the main event to come along.