Land of Echoes

Harvard-trained clinical psychologist and paranormal investigator Cree Black follows her well-received outing to New Orleans in CITY OF MASKS with a trip to the sun-baked West. Navajo teen Tommy Keeday is possessed by a lost spirit, and it's up to Cree and her team to uncover the narratives of the living and the dead to free it before the young artist dies. This fascinating concept and the performance of Earphones Award-winning narrator Anna Fields pull the reader along with growing interest and dread. This title is easily one of the better mysteries of recent years, and listeners will be completely satisfied. R.O. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

January 5, 2004
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. (Feb.)

Forecast:
This should do well with readers looking for credible, scientific investigations into the paranormal, a salient feature of all of Hecht's books
(
Skull Session;
The Babel Effect).