The Purification Ceremony

At a young age in the Maine woods, at the side of her father and great-uncle, a Micmac puoin, Diana Jackman learned to move freely in the wilderness, to sense a world invisible to most. A natural tracker from a long line of shamans, healers and hunters - an environmental software writer, estranged wife and mother - she has been taught by betrayal and loss to guard her feelings behind a wall of half-truths and silence. It has cost her many things: her family, her happiness, her peace. And it has brought her to a beautiful, frozen place of magic...and death.

Eight hunters have gathered on a vast, isolated estate in northern British Columbia, to track record book white tail deer at the snow-covered confluence of the Sticks and the Dream rivers. Diana Jackman is among them - drawn by the hunt and the ancient Power of her father's people.

But someone else is watching the hunting party - an insane and violent force of nature, hiding in the blinding whiteness of the Canadian winter. And now the hunters themselves have become the game.

One by one, they are being stalked, slaughtered and gutted like the animals they, themselves, are stalking. The killer is quick, relentless, frighteningly efficient.

For the first time in her life, Diana Jackman will know what it is to be prey - but she must fight the instinct to flee. To survive, she will have to rely on her father's teachings, and set out alone to hunt the hunter."

Native American Diana Jackman learned to track deer as a child from her shaman father. To shake off the depression of his recent suicide, Diana leads a group of rich hunters on a trip into British Columbia after whitetail deer--only to discover that someone is hunting the hunters. When two members of the group are killed and gutted, it's up to Diana to use her skills and her anger to track down a crafty, crazed murderer. Mark Sullivan's descriptions of the stark landscape and the details of the hunt add greatly to the book's growing terror. His past thrillers, The Fall Lineand Hard News, are available in paperback.