I read the first two in Daniel Hecht’s Cree Black series, City of Masks and Land of Echoes, which are genre-bending mixes of mystery, paranormal, horror, and ghost stories. Cree Black is a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist who works for a company that investigates paranormal activity (much like the Ghostbusters movie without the humor). This series now has a third volume, Bones of the Barbara Coast. These should be read in sequence because Cree’s personal paranormal experience colors her work and is gradually revealed in subsequent novels.
City of Masks is set in New Orleans and involves a haunted mansion and a terrified teenaged girl. Lila Beauforte has a cold mother and is forced into the Southern Belle ideal of womanhood despite a traumatic childhood event. Cree Black uses her paranormal experience, her psychological background, and her immense empathy to bond with both ghosts and humans to solve the mystery. The pacing is sometimes a bit off, and it was repetitive at times. My main complaint about this book was the huge number of typographical errors. I don’t know if this was a formatting problem or what, but it’s clear no one reviewed the formatted version before it was uploaded to Amazon—and no one has looked at it since to produce a corrected version. Even characters’ names are misspelled. However, the story was compelling enough to push me forward, but at times I came close to throwing my Kindle against the wall in frustration.
Land of Echoes is set in New Mexico and involves Navajo beliefs in the supernatural. Cree investigates when Tommy Keeday, a teenager in a school for gifted Navajo children, begins to have nightly convulsions. I have long enjoyed the Hillermans’ Navajo-inspired books, and so this one was more up my alley. It also lacked the typos of City of Masks.
Overall, these were interesting, ghostly with enough science thrown in to make the stories believable; however, not being a huge horror fan, I won’t continue the series.
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City of Masks (Bloomsbury, December 17, 2008) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Land of Echoes (Bloomsbury, December 7, 2008) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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