The Purification Ceremony

The Purification Ceremony (1997)A novel by

Mark T SullivanAwardsEdgar Awards (nominee)Next book byMark T Sullivan

Ata young age in the Maine woods, at the side of her father andgreat-uncle, a Micmac puoin, Diana Jackman learned to move freely inthe wilderness, to sense a world invisible to most. A natural trackerfrom a long line of shamans, healers and hunters - an environmentalsoftware writer, estranged wife and mother - she has been taught bybetrayal and loss to guard her feelings behind a wall of half-truthsand silence. It has cost her many things: her family, her happiness,her peace. And it has brought her to a beautiful, frozen place ofmagic...and death. Eight hunters have gathered on a vast, isolatedestate in northern British Columbia, to track record book white taildeer at the snow-covered confluence of the Sticks and the Dream rivers.Diana Jackman is among them - drawn by the hunt and the ancient Powerof her father's people. But someone else is watching the hunting party- an insane and violent force of nature, hiding in the blindingwhiteness of the Canadian winter. And now the hunters themselves havebecome the game. One by one, they are being stalked, slaughtered andgutted like the animals they, themselves, are stalking. The killer isquick, relentless, frighteningly efficient. For the first time in herlife, Diana Jackman will know what it is to be prey - but she mustfight the instinct to flee. To survive, she will have to rely on herfather's teachings, and set out alone to hunt the hunter.