Book gives life to ancient culture

COME IN AND COVER ME. By Gin Phillips. Riverhead Books. 352 pages. $26.95.

Ren Taylor, the appealing, soul-searching character at the heart of this novel, is an archaeologist of some renown in the canyons of the New Mexico desert.

She has uncovered an extraordinary set of exotic ceramic pottery of a 12th-century artist of the Mimbres, a long-vanished tribe of Native Americans; now she wants to flesh out the artist's puzzling story. With the help of a colleague and would-be lover, Silas Cooper, she begins to do so.

But she will need something more to show the way: ghostly visitations by the prehistoric artist herself, named Lynay, as well as by an older Mimbres woman, Non.

With a sure hand, Gin Phillips weaves this strand of the supernatural through a compelling modern story of love and loss.

"Come in and Cover Me" is Phillips' second novel. Her first, "The Well and the Mine," was set in a Depression-era town in her native Alabama.

Relocating her fictional terrain to the sweeping vistas of the Southwest, Phillips has mined scholarly archaeological research to bring historical texture to her latest novel and give life to the intriguing Mimbres people and culture.