The Firehandler

WHEN YOU PLAY WITH FIRE, YOU WILL GET BURNED.There’s something evil lurking in Lake Manitou. Lily Weber senses it when she returns home in 1897, but as a young woman caught between cultures, she doesn’t know who to turn to for answers. Her Christian mentors certainly understood good and evil. As a star student at Sacred Heart Indian Mission, she learned about Biblical accounts of Satan as a serpent, Leviathan, and Red Dragon. Her Dakota mother told tales of another horned serpent, the evil Unktehi who brought the great flood and, even in death, is a force to be feared. From her estranged paternal grandfather, she learned another form of the evil horned serpent, the Mishi-Ginebig, a dreaded creature from Anishinaabe lore that sleeps below the waters of Lake Manitou. Her grandfather fervently believes in prophecies that explain the strange portents and omens happening in the area, but he doesn’t seem to trust Lily after she was baptized and took a new name. When her neighbors begin to vanish and die, Lily initially dismisses superstition for a much more likely monster: corrupt local businessmen willing to do anything to steal the reservation land. When a mysterious Jesuit priest arrives offering help, Lily begins a journey that will challenge her understanding of good and evil, reality and myth, and duty and love. THE DREAMCATCHER CHRONICLES is a generational battle between good and evil, where the dark deeds of the past shape the present-and the prophecies of the future reach back to influence the past.