Stuff
Product Details
Scribner, February 2005
Trade Paperback, 352 pages
ISBN-10: 0743272102
ISBN-13: 9780743272100
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Description
The dazzling, award-winning debut in a series that delivers mystery, romance, suspense, and fascinating forensic detail
When farmers cutting turf in an Irish peat bog make a grisly discovery -- the perfectly preserved head of a young woman with long red hair -- Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire and American pathologist Nora Gavin must use cutting-edge techniques to preserve ancient evidence. Because the bog's watery, acidic environment prevents decay, it's difficult to tell how long the red-haired girl has been buried -- two years, two centuries, or even much longer. Who is she? The extraordinary find leads to even more disturbing puzzles. The red-haired girl is not the only enigma in this remote corner of Galway. Two years earlier, Mina Osborne, the wife of a local landowner, went for a walk with her young son and vanished without a trace. Could they, too, be hidden in the bog's treacherous depths, only to be discovered centuries from now? Or did Hugh Osborne murder his family, as some villagers suspect? Bracklyn House, Osborne's stately home, holds many secrets, and Nora and Cormac's inquiries threaten to expose them all.
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Chapter 1How did you come to write this book?
While traveling in Ireland years ago, I heard a story about two brothers cutting turf in a bog in Ireland, who came across the perfectly preserved, severed head of a beautiful red-haired girl. It was clear that the girl had been decapitated, and her position in the bog suggested it might have happened about 300 years earlier, around the time of Oliver Cromwell's invasion and occupation of Ireland. All I could think when I heard this story was that it was the best opening I’d ever heard for a mystery, so I started with the basic facts of the real story and made all the rest up! It seemed to me that the red-haired girl (or the cáilín rua, as she's called in HAUNTED GROUND) deserved to have a complex and compelling story, even if it was a work of fiction. As I worked on the first novel, I found a powerful metaphor in the science of archaeology, digging through the past to unearth strange and mysterious connections to the present. I also found that the history of Ireland is an amazing wellspring for me -- so many images and ideas to sift through! The Irish poet Seamus Heaney had it right in his poem, "Bogland" -- "the wet centre is bottomless..."
Booklist
Gripping...fascinating.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
A chilling murder mystery that spans centuries.
"In Haunted Ground, the past is not buried underground, it lives and breathes. Erin Hart's beguiling debut novel probes the mysterious connections between the dead and living in a moody Irish song of innocent blood, shattered hearts, and life's unquenchable flow."
-- Perri O'Shaughnessy, author of Unlucky in Law
"Hart writes with a lovely eloquence about how character is shaped by the music, the architecture, and the history of this harsh and beautiful land."
-- The New York Times Book Review
Suite101.com, September 6, 2011
...forensic science set against the backdrop of the lush Irish countryside. The Red-Headed Girl and the Missing Wife Haunted Ground is full of characters trying to bury the ghosts of their pasts only to have them all rise up out of a peat bog ...
Erin Hart's Books
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False MermaidA chilling new suspense novel from Erin Hart that brilliantly combines forensics, archaeology, and history with Irish myth and mystery.Read More
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Lake of SorrowsAmerican pathologist Nora Gavin has come to the Irish midlands to examine a body unearthed at a desolate spot known as the Lake of Sorrows. As with...Read More
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