Customer Reviews

City of Masks: A Cree Black Thriller (Cree Black Thrillers)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

have read two books by Hecht, both of which I almost liked (The Babel Effect and Skull Music). By almost liked, I really liked the energy, but there was something about the plot in both cases that gave me pause.

An online acquaintance recommended I give the Cree Black novels a go, so I picked up City of Masks. I was expecting a detective novel, but not a paranormal detective novel. Well-- at least a detective series with a parapsychologist as the main character. I was a little suspicious, getting into the book.

I'm still a little suspicious, I have to admit. But it worked much better than I would have thought. Cree Black is a good character. Her reasons for choosing her field, are well-played not overplayed. Hecht's ability to detail his environment is very good. We explored New Orleans here along with its ghosts. I wasn't in a terribly good mood when I picked up the book, and I found it nearly absurdly comforting. That's a good thing.

Perhaps it still isn't perfect-- there's something about the pacing and the length that felt off. A little too long? But this is a minor quibble. I'm going to go ahead and pick up the second.

Daniel Hecht isn't capable of writing a bad book or of writing badly. With an imagination as fertile as his, and with superior writing/narrative skill, whatever he tackles is never less than intriguing. City of Masks is no exception. Hecht tackles the world of the paranormal via engaging heroine Cree Black--a thoroughly believable, fully dimensional woman who just happens to be a ghost-hunting psychologist.

Hecht flirts perilously close to dubious territory in having his characters posit the possibilities of recovered/repressed memory (discredited by courts and by the APA) and multiple personality disorder (discredited universally--but so beloved by its supposed victims that it's been renamed DID) and satantic ritual abuse (again, discredited.) Despite these flirtations with discredibted syndromes, it is a credit to the author that he never goes all the way down any of those roads and, in fact, builds a viable case for sad, haunted Lila--whose ghosts Cree has come to New Orleans to "bust."

The characters are so well drawn and so believably driven/tormented/haunted that they come across as entirely sympathetic. And the author's research into the city of New Orleans is seamlessly woven into the narrative so that we see the city through Cree's eyes, rather than through the author's--no small feat.

While the villain of the piece was obvious to me very early on, it was nevertheless fascinating to see how the author was going to take us there and to learn what surprises were in store. And, indeed, there are some unexpected twists. The achievement of this book is the author's ability to make us care about his central characters, thereby making us willing to travel with them into territory where suspension of disbelief might not otherwise be possible. Most of us are willing to entertain the possibility that there might be ghosts; Hecht extrapolates on the possibilities in convincing fashion.
Highly recommended.

Daniel Hecht's novel City Of Masks introduces Psi Research Associates, a team of paranormal researchers comprised of Cree Black and Edgar Mayfield, researchers, and their assistant/footwork researcher Joyce Wu. The organiztion studies all kinds of supernatural phenomena, including ghosts and hauntings, documents it and comes up with theories and hypotheses, in an effort to have the study of the paranormal taken seriously by the scientific community at large. Their work is funded by making their services available to individuals needing help with real or supposed supernatural activity, including the events transpiring in New Orleans that the novel focuses on.

Cree is the main point-of-view character, and her own involvement with the whole paranormal world is rooted in an event in her own past. She'd never had any kind of ghostly encounters, never put too much stock in the idea, until the day a number of years ago when her husband died, and she saw him thousands of miles from where he was supposed to be, Before learning that he'd been killed in an accident earlier that day. Since then she's delved into the world of the paranormal, almost obsessively, hoping to understand it, to verify to herself that it's actually real, and perhaps to even make contact again someday. Cree is also an empath, picking up on the thoughts and emotions of people around her, sometimes even the 'psychic residue' left in certain places, but her empathic ability has a dangerous edge to it. If she lets it go too far (and sometimes she doesn't really have any choice about how far it goes), she starts picking up habits and mannerisms, occasionally attitudes, of the person she's empathically tuned into. At its most extreme, she can lose much of her self and, temporarily, almost 'become' the other person. And just to make it even more complex, her empathy works on the remaining, eathbound, energies of the dead as well, all of whom seem to leave at least some trace of a psychic marker in the physical world that says 'we were here'.

The case focused on in City Of Masks takes place in New Orleans in the manor of one Of New Orleans's old monied families, the Beaufortes. After recently moving back into the previously vacant Beauforte House - site of either a suicide or, possibly, a murder, in the recent past - Lila Beauforte apparantly experienced a number of strange phenomena that left her terrified and resulted in her fleeing the house along with her disbelieving but concerned (although oftentimes unintentionally condescending) husband Jack. No one in the Beauforte family aside from Lila herself believes in what allegedly transpired there, but the family has called in a paranormal investigator hoping that it'll quell Lila and make her feel that everything's been taken care of.

The types of paranormal phenomenon Cree and her partners have previously dealt with are quite different from the more familiar ghosts. Existing as old energy patterns waiting to be freed, existing often as a fragment of a person instead of the full individual - for example the ghost may be a specific memory and nothing more, a phantom acting out that one specific event with no real ties to the rest of its former existance. I've heard of ghosts who, in their earthbound state, have become fixated on a specific memory - such as their death - and have fixated on it to a point where they remember little else: these ghosts abound in all kinds of good books and movies, fixated on, for example, vengeance for their unjust death to the point where they're incapable of telling right from wrong in their pursuit for retribution. But I've never heard of ghosts who basically ARE that memory, disattached from the deceased individual. I've also heard of phantoms that are like afterimages on film: they're not really there but you can see them, just like a person isn't really in a photograph but you can see the evidence of them. This kind of apparition seems to fit more closely with some of the phenomena Cree and her partners have encountered, but it's like a functioning afterimage - almost like a sliver of a soul was sliced off and left behind. The very concepts are unsettling and unique. These are what Cree and her partners have dealt with in the past, and they don't claim to understand what they really are, but in the case of a haunting, they hope to not only assist the living but to 'alleviate' the entity, set it free, whatever 'it' is.

In New orleans's Beauforte House though, Cree encounters something previous experience, and all the paranormal research papers she's read, hasn't prepared her for: a much more tangible entity, one which can interact with the living to an uncommon degree, one that's far more nightmarish and openly malevolent than she's faced before. It's fixated its aggressions on Lila, and Cree's concern for the other woman - a likable, friendly-but-timid middle-aged woman who seems to have been Broken by something but to be struggling bravely to fight her way back from it - is the main factor for continuing to confront this monstrosity, not the scientific merits of actually documenting something this far off the radar of what's normal.

The book is extremely well written, grabbing you righ t from page 1, full of cool ideas, rich descriptions, and a a great ensemble of characters. Some are highly likable (like Cree and Lila) and others not nearly so much, though interestingly, even the unlikable characters are sometimes likable at the same time. They're well drawn out, with all these different facets to their personalities - some of their traits and behaviors you strongly dislike, while other aspects of them you can respect or even admire. Full of twists in both the plot and the characters (you may revise your opinions on who's likable and who isn't and then back again a couple of times as you go along), old buried secrets coming to light, and eerie, ghastly happenings, this is a must-read for fans of horror, mystery, or thrillers. Only caveat (not so much for horror fans as for mystery or thriller fans) - some of the scenes in here are really harrowing and disturbing. Personally I thought it worked excellently with the overall story, but it may be too graphic for some tastes. Myself, I thought it was a brilliant book and give it four-and-a-half stars.

Hecht has written a story that holds together in an interesting way. The prose is engaging and pulls you through a story that has some awkward flaws.

Primarily, the strength of Cree Black and the Beauforte family lays in the fullness of the characters that slowly come forwards. Another strong point is that of the mystery surrounding the ghosts Cree Black has come to investigate. The entire story revolves around a rape that occurred thirty years ago and the after math that unfolds around it.

Strangely enough, the weakest parts of the story are the ghost aspects. Cree Black, as interesting as she is, undergoes several supernatural experiences that reveal the buried mystery. Instead of deduction and sleuth work, Black uncovers the past through encounters with spirits. I kind of find this as being silly and was unable to believe that all the most important points of enlightenment come through ghosts that guide the story along.

That aside, this was an enjoyable story, though I don't see myself recommending it to anyone. Their are just too many other books out there that are better than this.

Parapsychologist Cree Black is a ghost buster - an empath who gets to know her ghosts and thereby frees them from earthly bondage. It's a dangerous empathy though. She so closely sympathizes with people - and their deaths - that she can take on their characteristics.

This series opener takes Cree to New Orleans and the 150-year-old Beauforte House. Lila Beauforte's attempt to live in her ancestral home ended so badly that her family fears for her sanity. They - a venerable old family gone to seed - humor her terrors to the extent of hiring Cree to exorcise the ghost they don't believe in.

But all too soon Cree begins unearthing violent secrets (through a combination of ghost work and detecting) and real ghosts and the family circles its wagons against her. All but Lila, who has kept the true horror of the house to herself. Hecht keeps the pace brisk, juxtaposing suspense with investigatory digging and parapsychology, which culminates in a violent climax and cathartic resolution.

The series set-up is intriguing - a balance between the scientific (Cree's technological partner is on another case in this book) and the supernatural - and Cree is likeable despite an irritating tendency to angst and depression due to her husband's death nine years before. This pall becomes wearing and unfortunately pads a story which doesn't need padding. With romance, detective work, ghosts, murder, mayhem, sordid secrets and history to juggle, Hecht has more than enough substance. Good ghost detectives are hard to come by so let's hope Cree gets over it in her next adventure.

i'm very impressed. :-)

hecht writes well (great rhythmic flow, not surprising considering he's also an accomplished musician), plots well (reminded me a bit of the magus in terms of layers unfolding), researches well (a very vivid portrayal of new orleans), creates complex engaging characters (cree just draws you in, like people/ghosts she encounters draw her in, joyce is a hoot, etc.), and provides substantial scary/emotional reader payoffs (an early scene in the "haunted house" is truly horrifying, cree's self-discoveries are very moving, etc.).

there's so much to like about this novel, but just two flaws (for me): 1) hecht can do "scary" as well as anyone i've read, but he doesn't do it enough in the book; i wanted more. 2) i found the ending a bit flat and disappointing.

if you like ghost stories and/or psychological mysteries, definitely read it. :-)

But there are a LOT of typos in this Kindle edition, I guess from that "Captcha" technology? Very annoying, makes it seem poorly written.
It's OK, glad I only paid $1.99.