Cree Black

Introducing Cree Black, a parapsychologist with a haunted past. When Lila Beauforte takes up residence in her ancestral home, the 150-year-old Beauforte House in the Garden District of New Orleans, she is terrified by ghostly apparitions. The family reluctantly calls Cree Black for help. Based out of Seattle, Cree, a parapsychologist with a degree from Harvard, is a "ghost buster." But as Cree gets closer to the truth, the proverbial skeletons in the closet of the prestigious Beauforte family come crashing down on her, and she must struggle to keep her own ghosts at bay. Daniel Hecht has created a plausible, heart-stopping ghost thriller. Relying on the science of parapsychology to spine-tingling effect, he brings to life a remarkably compelling character in Cree Black-as well as the ghosts she confronts.

Lucretia (Cree) Black is a parapsychologist whose investigative methods include in-depth historical research and psychological analysis. When she's asked by her former mentor, renowned neuropsychiatrist Mason Ambrose, if she would examine the case of a fifteen-year-old boy suffering from bizarre and frightening symptoms, Cree refuses to get involved. Physically and emotionally exhausted, she's planning to take some time off. But Ambrose is persistent, so Cree reluctantly finds herself heading for a private boarding school on a Native American reservation in New Mexico. Nothing in Cree's background as a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist or her experience as a paranormal investigator has prepared her for Tommy Keeday's case. A talented young Navajo, Tommy has recently been enduring violent, agonizing seizures that his family believes are signs of possession by a chindi, a hostile spirit. As Cree struggles to find answers, she becomes increasingly aware that Tommy and the people who surround him have some deep and disturbing secrets. The follow-up to City of Masks, a Booksense 76 pick, this second novel in the Cree Black series is a thrillingly plausible supernatural mystery, a passionate love story, and a thoughtful exploration of Navajo culture and identity in modern America.

In this thrilling novel set in two periods of San Francisco history, Cree Black confronts the mystery of one of the strangest victims of the Great Quake. Bert Marchetti, a friend and homicide inspector, asks Cree to help investigate a human skeleton recently unearthed in the foundation of an old San Francisco home, supposedly the bones of a victim of the 1906 earthquake. The bones have been sent to UC Berkeley for analysis, where their peculiar characteristics and anatomical deformities have intrigued the forensic anthropology team. They call the skeleton Wolfman. So who was the Wolfman? What caused the deformities, and how did he end up in that grand hilltop home? Cree's historical research takes her back to the unholy glory days of the Barbary Coast, old San Francisco's infamous red-light district. As she assists at the forensics lab, she also begins to realize that Bert Marchetti's involvement with the case is more complex than he has let on. Her narrative is illuminated by entries from the 1889 diary of Lydia Schweitzer, a Victorian woman with her own secrets-and her own compelling interest in the person who would come to be known as the Wolfman. A vivid and elegantly plotted thriller that reveals San Francisco's hidden face across two centuries, Bones of the Barbary Coast tells the story of two women determined to face human nature's darkest aspects with courage and compassion.