City of Masks: A Cree Black Thriller (Cree Black Thrillers) [Hardcover]

Daniel Hecht (Author)

Book Description

Series: Cree Black Thrillers | Publication Date: January 8, 2003

Introducing Cree Black, a parapsychologist with a haunted past.

The 150-year-old Beauforte House, located in the Garden District in New Orleans, has some secrets. When Lila Beauforte takes up residence in her ancestral home as an adult she begins to see some of those secrets literally come to life. Terrified by an insidious and ultimately violent presence, Lila is losing her characteristic tenacity. Fearing for his sister's sanity, Ronald Beauforte reluctantly calls Cree Black for help.

Based out of Seattle, Cree Black and her partner take on the world beyond our senses. Detectives of the spirit, the so-called ghostbusters are able to conjure ghosts with the hope of exorcising them out of people's lives. A natural empath with a Ph.D. in psychology, Cree is susceptible to the emotional vulnerability of her clients. As she gets closer to the truth, the proverbial bones in the closet of the prestigious New Orleans family come crashing down around them, and Cree must fight to keep her own ghosts from destroying her.

In this first of a series novels featuring Cree Black, Daniel Hecht has created an entirely plausible heart-stopping ghost thriller. Hecht is a master storyteller and this intelligent, unusual take on the supernatural tale combines a traditional mystery with a compassionate exploration of life's real emotional passages and existential questions. 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If it's New Orleans and the novel's main characters have been dead for years but are still walking around terrorizing people, it must be an Anne Rice adventure. But it isn't--it's the first in a new series starring a fascinating heroine, Seattle parapsychologist Cree Black, whose own murky past and special gifts make her the perfect choice to investigate a haunted house in the Garden District and the family that's slowly being scared to death. Lila Beauforte has moved back into her ancestral home, now inhabited by ghosts who seem bent on driving her out. Cree, her senses more attuned to the presence of revenants than flesh-and-blood bad guys, shakes enough closets in Beauforte House to bring the skeletons out, solve mysteries of the past as well as the present, and fall in love with an equally appealing if more traditional investigator of the unconscious who may be able to help her free herself from her own emotional prison. She's a smart, vulnerable, and attractive character in an unearthly and unusual thriller that starts off a promising new series with a howl and presages a long run on the bestseller list. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

Hecht (Skull Session; The Babel Effect; etc.) introduces empathic investigator ("ghost buster" to the layman) Cree Black in a haunted house tale set-where else?-in a storied New Orleans mansion. Cree, an investigator of paranormal phenomena with a slick Seattle office, is retained by the vaguely sleazy Ronald Beauforte, the last scion of a decaying New Orleans family. His sister, Lila, is losing her mind, and she insists it is because her family's ancestral mansion is haunted. Cree is summoned South to see if she can use her empathic talents to suss out the ghosts and prevent Lila's disintegration. Cree is still nursing years-old grief over the death of her husband, even talking with him in her mind; this accounts for her sensitive psychic antennae, and also explains why she's loath to acknowledge the unsubtle romantic attentions of her business partner, Edgar. Since Edgar is tied up with another case, Cree has to fly solo to bayou country, facing down the Machiavellian Beauforte family matriarch, local hoodoo practitioners, and even a menacing hired gun with the sobriquet "Loup Garou." Hecht explains aspects of modern-day ghost hunting and offers a Faustian red herring in the form of a handsome young psychiatrist. Yet while he paints a rich, compelling picture of the world of paranormal research, the plot holds few surprises, and the characters' psychology and motives tend to be overexplained. Hecht's previous thrillers have been impressively sophisticated, but this predictable-though atmospheric-effort may cause readers to think they, too, have supernatural powers: they know how the book will end well before they've finished it.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; First U.S. Edition edition (January 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582343411
• ISBN-13: 978-1582343419
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.8 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #415,480 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Family Spirit, February 11, 2004

By 

Marc Ruby™ "The Noh Hare™" (Warren, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: City of Masks: A Cree Black Novel (Paperback)

I bought 'City of Masks' based on a new release description expecting a standard fare ghost story (which I like), read the inside cover and thought it was a ghost romance story (which I don't like) and came very close to putting it on my 'read someday' pile. Fortunately I didn't. While it is a little of both of the above, it is quite a bit more as well, For the mystery reader looking for something both unusual and a little scary, Daniel Hecht has turned out a solid, entertaining read.

Cree Black is one of a team of spiritual investigators who specialize in ghost removal. She is a clinical psychologist who discovered during a terrible loss that ghosts exist and she is sensitive to them. This sensitivity extends to those who are haunted as well, and Cree's exorcisms are often intense personal crises. When she responds to the call of a socially prominent New Orleans family who is being haunted by a violent and menacing spirit she quickly is up to her neck in tradition and ectoplasm.

A pig headed ghost repeatedly molests a woman in a family mansion, a news reported dies without any explanation, and the head of a family finds herself desperately trying to preserve what honor and sanity are left for her heirs. Hecht's style bores deep into all the main characters, but deepest into the heart of Cree, whose own ghosts have brought her life to a standstill. To solve the mystery of the apparitions she will have to start the tortuous journey of unraveling her own issues.

Hecht accomplishes this without histrionics. Without overpainting the atmospherics and real violence that lurks beneath the surface of New Orleans and the Mardi Gras. The end result is a novel so believable that you sometimes want to take notes. Many of the characters, sympathetic and otherwise, quickly take on a life of their own against a finely drawn background of wealth and poverty in Louisiana. I believe Hecht has written a sequel, to which I am looking forward.

43 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars interesting premise...disappoints, August 22, 2005

By 

S. Harris (Atlanta GA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: City of Masks: A Cree Black Novel (Paperback)

I really started out liking this story. Loved the New Orleans setting and the idea of ghost hunting combined with a possible hoodoo/voodoo connection. But the character of Cree Black got on my nerves so bad that I found myself not caring much about her one way or the other. She is supposed to be a 'brilliant' Ph.D in psychology, but she's an emotional train wreck who can hardly navigate her way through life. Why anyone would pay her thousands to exorcise their ghosts is beyond me. She's ineffectual, totally incapable of intimacy, lies compulsively to her friends and family, and seems stuck in this self-pity time warp over her husband who died 9 years ago! Please!

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Modern Science meets the Ghostbusters, January 5, 2003

By 

Lisa Tucker (Louisville, Kentucky United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: City of Masks: A Cree Black Thriller (Cree Black Thrillers) (Hardcover)

From page one I knew that this book was the pick of the litter from my local chain bookstore. It happened to be a second string choice for me but it turned into the best book I have purchased since Patricia Cornwell's 'Kay Scarpetta' novels.
Cree Black reads as a very likeable and down to earth person, an easy to relate to character although, sometimes I could hear myself screaming "Dont go in there!" to her as I read some of the more spine tingling and scary situations she put herself into. The addition of modern science adds so much to this story that I almost believed in ghosts myself.
While this book shows some of the darker or seedier sides of New Orleans it is also charming and nostalgic in its descriptions. I loved the history, the cemetaries and the old Beauforte house. What great descriptive detail this writer gives! I look forward to much more ghost hunting tales with Cree Black and Daniel Hecht. Hurry Daniel, I want more.