Land of Echoes (Cree Black Thrillers)

Hecht, Daniel

ISBN 10: 0786188774 ISBN 13: 9780786188772

Publisher: Blackstone Pub, 2004

Synopsis

Lucretia (Cree) Black is a parapsychologist whose investigative methods include in-depth historical research and psychological analysis. When she's asked by her former mentor, renowned neuropsychiatrist Mason Ambrose, if she would examine the case of a fifteen-year-old boy suffering from bizarre and frightening symptoms, Cree refuses to get involved. Physically and emotionally exhausted, she's planning to take some time off. But Ambrose is persistent, so Cree reluctantly finds herself heading for a private boarding school on a Native American reservation in New Mexico. Nothing in Cree's background as a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist or her experience as a paranormal investigator has prepared her for Tommy Keeday's case. A talented young Navajo, Tommy has recently been enduring violent, agonizing seizures that his family believes are signs of possession by a chindi, a hostile spirit. As Cree struggles to find answers, she becomes increasingly aware that Tommy and the people who surround him have some deep and disturbing secrets. The follow-up to City of Masks, a Booksense 76 pick, this second novel in the Cree Black series is a thrillingly plausible supernatural mystery, a passionate love story, and a thoughtful exploration of Navajo culture and identity in modern America.

About this title

About the Author:

Daniel Hecht was a professional guitarist for twenty years. He took up writing in 1989 and received his MFA degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1992. His first novel, Skull Session, was a bestseller. He lives in Montpelier, Vermont.

Anna Fields (1965-2006), winner of more than a dozen Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award in 2004, was one of the most respected narrators in the industry. Trained at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, she was also a director, producer, and technician at her own studio, Cedar House Audio.

From Publishers Weekly:

Hecht takes another step toward his grand goal of setting a supernatural mystery in every U.S. state with this second in the Cree Black series. City of Masks, the well-received first installment, featured a haunted mansion in New Orleans; here, Hecht crafts a novel of possession set in Tony Hillerman territory, the sun-baked high desert mesas of western New Mexico. Fifteen-year-old Tommy Keeday, a student at a boarding school for gifted American Indians, has bizarre seizures with no physical explanation. The local Navajos think the boy is possessed by a chindi, an ancestral spirit bent on seizing control of his tormented body. Parapsychologist and natural empath Lucretia "Cree" Black, one of a three-person team of high-tech ghost hunters, is called in to solve the mystery of the boy's supernatural illness. Cree explains a ghost as "fragments of a once-living human personality that somehow keep manifesting in the absence of a physical body." If she can puzzle out what the ghost wants, she reasons, then it can be banished. Hecht's novel has an extensive cast of characters, each burdened with a painful past or dark secret that eventually appears in the complex fabric of the plot. This multitude of stories plus the exhaustive evocations of local history and geography sometimes obscure the plight of poor tortured Tommy, but determined readers will find sufficient goose-bump material to make up for the overly detailed justifications.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Blackstone Pub
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0786188774
• ISBN 13: 9780786188772
• Binding: Audio CD