About This Book
In Sacred Ground, Mercedes Lackey uses Native American culture, beliefs, and magic as the foundation for a contemporary novel of fantasy and suspense.
Jennifer Talldeer is Osage and Cherokee, granddaughter of a powerful Osage Medicine Man. She walks a difficult path: contrary to tribal custom, grandfather Mooncrow teaches Jennifer more than the usual shaman’s skills: she learns a warrior’s magics.As Kestrel-Hunts-Alone, Jennifer is still an apprentice shaman despite her many skills, her age and her success in her chosen profession. As a private investigator, Jennifer works the usual cases- missing persons, divorce, insurance- in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area.Her two worlds, never far apart, draw closer together when a routine insurance investigation begins to look like fraud, and worse. Fragments of human bone and Indian artifacts are discovered on the site of a new shopping mall, and minutes later the bulldozer excavating the site blows up. Rod Calligan, the owner of the construction company, claims the bomb was planted by Native American activists led by Jennifer’s former lover, David Spotted Horse.
Calligan has no proof to back up his accusations- and his innocence seems a mask to Kestrel’s penetrating inner eye. But Spotted Horse is no longer a simple idealist. He may have become a terrorist, willing to kill innocents to gain “justice.”
The mall site is not the only desecration claiming Jennifer’s attention. The grave of her great ancestor, the Medicine Man Watches-Over-The-Land, has been destroyed, and a great evil freed to walk the land. Jennifer must stand against the darkness. If she wavers even for an instant she will be annihilated- and the world will fall into oblivion.