Land of Echoes: A Cree Black Novel (Cree Black Thrillers) - Hardcover

Hecht, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582343934 ISBN 13: 9781582343938

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2004

Synopsis

In the end it is people, not places, that are haunted.

Tommy Keeday is a talented student at a boarding school for gifted Navajo teens, located in the vast high desert of western New Mexico. When he is suddenly seized by an illness with bizarre and frightening symptoms, his family believes he is possessed by a chindi, the hostile spirit of a dead ancestor. But Julieta McCarty, the principal of Oak Springs School, is unwilling to accept either a traditional Navajo explanation or a conventional medical diagnosis. In desperation, she calls on Seattle-based parapsychologist Cree Black.

Nothing in Cree's training as a clinical psychologist or her experience as a paranormal investigator has prepared her for the dangerous task of helping this brilliant boy in whom two spirits seem to battle. Is Tommy Keeday just a sensitive but troubled teenager, or is he suffering from an exotic brain disorder? Or is there truth in the terrifying Navajo legends of witches, skinwalkers, and malevolent ghosts? As Cree and her associates struggle to find the answer, it becomes apparent that there are secrets in the pasts of Tommy and the people around him, and that his fate can only be decided by exposing these unresolved longings and regrets.

Drawing on in-depth research and personal experience, Daniel Hecht's latest novel, the second 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 M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1992; his first novel, Skull Session, was a bestseller in 1997. Since then he has published two other novels, including the first of the Cree Black series, City of Masks, a BookSense 76 pick.

Reviews

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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At a New Mexico boarding school for gifted Navajo children, a 15-year-old boy endures a series of violent, agonizing seizures. The boy's convulsions are all the more troubling because extensive medical tests have ruled out a physical cause--and because the boys surrounding him during his seizures seem to become paralyzed by the same force. Parapsychologist Cree Black (who made an impressive debut in City of Masks, 2003) is almost forcibly brought in on the case by her mentor and is soon convinced that the boarding school is facing a bout with demonic possession. As with the first Cree Black novel, Hecht balances paranormal phenomena with everyday concerns (the endangered status of the school should tales of possession creep out). The isolation of the sagebrush desert surrounding the school is especially effective here, as are the ties with the Navajo legends of malevolent ghosts and skinwalkers. Creepy and convincing. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1582343934
• ISBN 13: 9781582343938
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400