Winter is bearing down on the Cherokee Nation. And in the cold and snow of the wind-whipped woods outside the town of Buckskin, an escaped prisoner is on the loose - a man bent on rescuing his sister and getting even with her abusive husband. Henderson Sixkiller is the runaway. Jessie Hatch is his sister, now hiding out in the home of a local doctor in fear that her husband will attack her again. For Buckskin chief of police Mitch Bushyhead, the violent family drama explodes when a call comes in to his station house: a body has been found in the woods. The dead man is Jessie Hatch's husband, a prominent Buckskin citizen. As soon as Mitch Bushyhead starts investigating, a community's dark secrets bubble to the surface - the secrets of a family torn by violence, of young men drifting into a life of crime, of a man facing a terror he could confess to no one. While Henderson Sixkiller is Bushyhead's first and leading suspect, there are nagging questions to which the police chief must find answers: questions about the beautiful, enigmatic doctor who sheltered Sixkiller's sister, Jessie; questions about the strange light that Sixkiller claims to have seen in the woods on the night of the murder. At the heart of The Fire Carrier is the ancient Cherokee myth of Atsil'-dihye'gi', a night-walking, torchbearing phantom whose evil power can only be dispelled by a medicine man. Henderson Sixkiller may have been the first to see the floating light, but he will not be the last...
Industry Reviews
Police Chief Mitch Bushyhead of Buckskin, Oklahoma, has another murder on his hands (Ghostland, 1992, etc.). Tyler Hatch, director of the Cherokee Nation's Job Corps Center, is found dead in his car in the woods, after smashing a window in the family clinic where his battered wife Jessie had taken refuge. Hatch's image as a dedicated man able to turn around the lives of miscreants and drug addicts cuts no ice with clinic head Dr. Rhea Vann. She's seen a terrorized Jessie too often and knows too about Hatch's womanizing - often with his young charges. Meanwhile, Mitch has some other problems: the escape from prison of Jessie's brother, Henderson Sixkiller, undoubtedly on the loose in the area; a series of late-night robberies of costly horse tackle from local ranchers; and reports of a mysterious light in the woods, seen by some as a return of the evil spirit Fire Carrier. The chief's life as a widower isn't too happy, either, with lover Lisa Macpherson getting her Ph.D. in California and only sporadically returning his calls. Mitch puts a lot of suspects through a lot of dull questioning, trying to pin down the source of the four blows that killed Hatch and seeking motives strong enough to lead to murder. The solution is as flat as most of this labored effort, despite a lengthy exploration of the Cherokee stomp-dance and a last-minute twist that attempts to work up some excitement. Too little, too late. Not one of Hager's better efforts. (Kirkus Reviews)
