Here is the ensnaring opener of Louise Erdrich's potent new novel: "The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail, eyes wild, bawling." We stare at the final moment of a murder spree that has taken the lives of five family members on a North Dakota farm close to a Chippewa reservation. The year is 1911. The murders provoke German-Americans to lynch four innocent Indians, an event that structures the novel. Doves of the title appear at various times throughout and are sometimes associated with injustice, but "The Plague of Doves" is not narrowly political, nor is it a whodunit. Though we do learn the identity of the murderer in the final pages, the novel is really about relationships and about how the past haunts the present.

V.S. Naipaul has made a distinction between plot and narrative, mocking plot as the trivial thing that produces TV melodramas. Narrative, however, takes its time and lovingly examines people and places --something Erdrich has done in book after book ever since her compelling "Love Medicine" (1984). She is obsessed with genealogy and creates nonlinear narratives. With interconnected stories told from the perspective of characters in four families -- native, white and mixed blood -- she moves us back and forth between the 1890s and the 1980s with methods well-suited to providing a broad picture of the reservation community.

Indeed character and patient revelation of character are her chief interests. Through four narrators -- Evelina Harp, Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, Marn Wolde and Dr. Cordelia Lochren -- we meet a host of sharply drawn individuals "whose backgrounds tangled in the hanging."

Evelina, who appears first and more often than other narrators, initially provides a somewhat disjointed account from a child's viewpoint. Listening to the tales of Mooshum, her grandfather, and keeping a journal, she slowly ripens into painful awareness of her family's complex history. By novel's end, she is a young adult with more certainty about the past than the future.

Mooshum, a colorful storyteller with something to hide, entertains Evelina and her brother Joseph, sometimes sharing the stage with Shamengwa, his younger brother, a handicapped but gifted violinist. Together the brothers tempt Father Cassidy, a reservation priest, into boozing when he visits the house to urge them to attend Mass more frequently. The tipsy religious discussions and disagreements are sometimes hilarious, but the family's annoyance with the priest escalates when Shamengwa dies and a drunken Father "Hop Along" insultingly eulogizes the wrong brother.

A more rounded character is Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf, granddaughter of a member of the lynch mob, a caring teacher who eventually discloses information that allows Evelina to understand her grandfather's psychological motivations and how he survived. Judge Coutts later explains, "Nothing that happens, nothing, is not connected here by blood," the broader implication being that we are all connected, our brothers' keepers.

Erdrich is gifted at rendering scenes. A poignant one occurs when Evelina and Mooshum make a ritualistic return to the lynching tree with the boots of Holy Tracks, one of the victims. Even before Evelina ties them together and tosses them into the upper branches, doves of guilt by the hundred clatter into the air.

Of many related stories is a compelling one about Billy Peace and Marn Wolde, two more interconnected descendants of the hangings. Billy, initially a skinny innocent, balloons into an obese, diabolical preacher who has sex with members of his sect while Marn, his wife, becomes fond of snakes and uses a diamondback to put an end to his tyranny.

The story that Erdrich keeps for the end introduces us to the sole survivor of the murder spree, Cordelia, the baby we saw briefly in the novel's first sentence. Now a doctor, she returns to the community and slowly discovers the truth about who murdered her family and the subsequent murder of innocents.

Though the complexity of Erdrich's genealogies is sometimes maddening, she cares about language and one of the great pleasures of her work is gleaming visual detail: "Where the full sun hit, the peonies were just bursting from their compact balls into spicy, shredded, pink confetti-petaled flowers." Also persuasive is her sense of the way narrative uncovers meaning: "When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape."

"The Plague of Doves" is rich with unforgettable stories.