Synopsis
World-weary documentary filmmaker Patrick Gallagher finds himself drawn to local police officer Andie Nightingale as a series of grisly, senseless murders threatens to unlock evil secrets from the past and to reveal a dark legacy for which a maniacal killer seeks revenge. 60,000 first printing. $100,000 ad/promo.
Reviews
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.
Nothing happens for the first time when a vengeful madman starts settling scores against the good citizens of Lawton, Vermontin a thriller that makes Sullivan's wild and woolly The Purification Ceremony (1997) look downright prim. The news that Father Victor D'Angelo, who died in 1918 after effecting some miraculous cures of influenza patients, is being considered for sainthood brings documentary filmmaker Patrick Gallagher to Lawton. But Gallagher's plans go out the window when his discovery of dentist Hank Potter's bodyraped, mutilated, and dumped into the Bluekill Riverthrows him together with alcoholic Sgt. Andromeda Nightingale, who'll be heading the investigation if she can stay on the wagon. A second, equally ritualistic murder convinces Andie and Gallagher that the killings are tied to Lawton's ostracism of a ne'er-do-well family a century ago, and before that to the massacre at Wounded Knee. A series of talismans and messages connecting the growing list of victims outlines a net of intrigue stretching from Sitting Bull's niece to a pair of local spiritualists to a government-trained assassin home from Vietnam. It's enough to strain even Oliver Stone's credulity, but the reason the Lawton town fathers aren't buying the story is that all of them, from the mayor and the police chief on down, have been so busy covering it up. It's dj... vu all over again, realizes Gallagher, who can't help noticing that his affair with Andie is more and more like his doomed romance with his ex-wife. Before the blood-soaked fadeout, Sullivan will have strewn every archetype from Jung to Frazier over the quiet New England landscape. Something for everyonebeatification, shamanism, reincarnation, New Age mysticism, necrophilia, a corrupt first family, and plenty of good old homicidebut maybe a little too much for anyone this time out. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Sullivan is an investigative journalist whose life took a turn when he published The Purification Ceremony, a thriller that got a few raves. Once again deploying a Native American theme, he introduces readers to documentary filmmaker Patrick Gallagher, who's looking for a little peace in small-town Vermont. Instead, he finds brutal murder that leads to a generations-old mystery and, finally, the Lakota "ghost dance."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The tiny town of Lawton, Vermont, may seem an unusual setting for a mystery concerned with Native American rituals, but Sullivan makes it work. In fact, he weaves such a compelling tale that readers will not be bothered by details that might seem cliches in other books: handsome, unhappy Patrick Gallagher rents a cabin from beautiful, mysterious Andie Nightingale. When Gallagher finds a body while fishing, a chain of events is set off that results in several more deaths. Adding to the intrigue is a journal written in the 1890s by a Lakota woman, Sarah Many Horses. What Sarah was doing in Lawton, and how her death became a dark, unspoken part of the town's history, is part of the puzzle Gallagher and Nightingale must solve while fighting their own demons--self-pity for him and the bottle for her. Sullivan's swings into Native American mysticism may be a bit much for some readers, but the strength of his prose and the thrill of suspense are big draws here. Jenny McLarin
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