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Ghost Dance

ebook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

Filming a documentary in Vermont, a fly fisherman hooks a corpse

Lawton is a peaceful town, resting between the Bluekill River and the soaring heights of the Green Mountains. But eighty years ago, this bucolic New England hamlet was decimated by the Spanish influenza. Only Father D'Angelo stood in its way, healing with his hands even as the plague ravaged his body. But beneath his sinless exterior, dark secrets tormented the miracle worker.

Decades later, troubled documentarian Patrick Gallagher comes to Lawton, attempting to tell Father D'Angelo's story. But thoughts of his ex-wife plague him, making him numb to the world and incapable of anything but fly-fishing in the Bluekill. There he snags something that rips his numbness away—the waterlogged corpse of a murdered local. The body draws him into the investigation of a string of bizarre deaths, the origins of which stretch back more than a century—to the time of influenza, and the horrors of the massacre at Wounded Knee.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 28, 1999
      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 flyfishing--a 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 Charun--a variant of the Greek Charon--who 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 investigates--and tries not to fall off the wagon--and 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.

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  • OverDrive Read
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Languages

  • English

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