Those Who Came Before
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
"Moncrieff’s novel is a lightning-fast read, which is not a bad thing. She paints a vivid picture of the lost tribe and weaves her story arcs together brilliantly. She also sheds light on Native peoples’ treatment in both past and present, smoothly integrating the issue into the novel. Readers won’t want to put it down." — Booklist
People are dying at Strong Lake, and the worst is yet to come.
An idyllic weekend camping trip is cut short when Reese Wallace s friends are brutally murdered. As the group s only survivor, Reese is the prime suspect, and his story doesn t make much sense. A disembodied voice warning him to leave the campground the night before? A strange, blackened tree that gave him an electric shock when he cut it down for firewood?
Detective Greyeyes isn t having any of it until she hears the voice herself and finds an arrowhead at the crime scene an arrowhead she can t get rid of. Troubling visions of a doomed Native American tribe who once called the campground home, and rumors of cursed land and a mythical beast plague the strangest murder case she s ever been a part of.
FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing. Launched in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On its face, this promising horror thriller with a Native American main character calls out the atrocities suffered by America's indigenous population, but it soon becomes clear that the underlying narrative buys into harmful stereotypes. The setting is Clear Springs, a thinly described fictional town that could be anywhere between Georgia and Ontario; the area's Native Americans, the Strong Lake Band, are likewise divorced from any real nations or cultures. Detective Maria Greyeyes, who has Native blood but was raised far from her roots, is called on to investigate a triple homicide at a campground the local Natives avoid because of rumors of evil spirits. When Maria enlists Chief Kinew to find the killer, she begins to learn more about her heritage and the area's "lost tribe." Sadly, the positive portrayals of Natives are overshadowed by the "savage Indian" trope and other clich s, including benevolent matriarchy, shamanic mysticism, and alcoholism. In addition to weak characterizations, the alternation between a survivor's disjointed first-person narration and Maria's emotionally distant third-person sections makes the story hard to follow. Liberal quantities of gore ("I saw a young woman turned into a puddle") can't keep this novel from being sluggish and unsatisfying.
