Ghost Dance - Hardcover

Mark T. Sullivan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340689234 ISBN 13: 9780340689233

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

For outdoorsman and documentary filmmaker Patrick Gallagher, Lawton, Vermont, is a fresh start...and a last chance. For beautiful, haunted local policewoman Andie Nightingale, it is a refuge and a prison. But for them both - and for every living resident of the sleepy New England hamlet - it is about to become Hell on Earth.

Gallagher discovers the first corpse while fishing: a large man, tortured, ravaged, and mutilated; an unspeakable horror despoiling a pristine natural landscape. And there are more murders to come, each more gruesome than the last. An elusive and terrifying killer preying on the small, isolated community is awakening the personal demons that plague Gallagher and Nightingale, drawing them into the nightmare of a past century. And the secret to the power and obsession of a fearsome force of twisted vengeance called "Charun" waits in a spiritual place that Patrick Gallagher and Andie Nightingale most fear but now must enter: the forbidden realm of the...Ghost Dance

About this title

About the Author

Mark T. Sullivan is currently a contributing editor at Outdoor Life magazine. He is the author of Hard News, The Fall Line, and the critically acclaimed thriller The Purification Ceremony. A certified Aikido instructor and an avid hunter, Mark lives with his wife and two sons in central Vermont.

From Publishers Weekly

Like his most recent (and most successful) thriller, The Purification Ceremony, Sullivan's fourth novel unfolds in rural America and features a strong Native American theme. There the resemblance ends, for there's little of Purification's eerie magic in this frustratingly roundabout suspense story tracking the sins of a dead priest in a Vermont town haunted by cross-cultural demons. Patrick Gallagher, a cultural anthropologist and filmmaker from Brooklyn, has come to the isolated Green Mountain community of Lawton to produce a documentary on an obscure parish priest who is being considered for sainthood. Father D'Angelo had healed 14 people during the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic, before dying; his last words: "Pray for me. I am one of the damned!" Gallagher rents a cabin from beautiful recovering alcoholic Andromeda ("Andie") Nightingale, who happens to be a sergeant in the state police, and goes flyfishingAa means of distraction on the day he's turning 40 and his ex-wife is getting remarried. One "fish" he hooks turns out to be the mutilated corpse of a local dentist. This is the first of a string of murders that all point to a local sociopath calling himself CharunAa variant of the Greek CharonAwho leaves notes alluding vaguely to Greek and Roman mythology and the Lawton river. The discovery of the journal of a Sioux woman describing the significant soul-releasing death ritual of the Ghost Dance holds clues to the murders, as does the ancestry of a disturbed former Lawton resident. Gallagher, who begins to have disturbing mystical dreams, aids Andie as she investigatesAand tries not to fall off the wagonAand they tentatively embark on a love affair. Sullivan, however, allows little emotional engagement with these characters. Moreover, the plot veers wildly, with the Father D'Angelo documentary element introduced and then quickly abandoned until two-thirds of the way through, when it is hastily and improbably reactivated. The narrative suffers from inflated prose ("Are you afraid now?" the villain "wickedly" asks a damsel in distress), and even solid background on the Ghost Dance lore of the Sioux doesn't save it from hokum. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0340689234
• ISBN 13: 9780340689233
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320