Haunted Ground
By Erin Hart
Scribner, 2003

(From the publisher) When farmers cutting turf in a peat bog make a grisly discovery—the perfectly preserved severed head of a young woman with long red hair—Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire and American pathologist Nora Gavin team up in a case that will open old wounds.

Peat bogs prevent decay, so the decapitated young woman could have been buried for two decades, two centuries, or even much longer. Who is she? When was she killed? The extraordinary find leads to even more disturbing puzzles. The red-haired girl is clearly a case for the archaeologists, not the police. Still, her tale may have shocking ties to the present, and Cormac and Nora must use cutting-edge techniques to preserve ancient evidence.

And the red-haired girl is not the only enigma in this remote corner of Galway. Two years earlier, Mina Osborne, the local landowner's Indian-born wife, went for a walk with her young son and never returned. Did Mina simply decide to disappear, or did mother and child become lost in the treacherous bog? Could they, too, be hidden in its depths, only to be discovered centuries from now? Or did the landowner, Hugh Osborne, murder his family, as some villagers suspect?

Bracklyn House, Osborne's stately home, holds many secrets for Nora and Cormac and policeman Garrett Devaney. But time is running out. Devaney's superiors want him off the Osborne case. Now. He wants to stay and find a killer.

Haunted Ground celebrates Ireland's turbulent history, revealing the eternal, subliminal connections between past and present.

About the Author

	© Andy King

(From Erinhart.com) Erin Hart was born in 1958 and grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, the second of four children in a family that believed in reading. Educated at Saint Olaf College and the University of Minnesota, Hart originally trained to become a theater director, and was eventually employed as a copywriter, writing teacher, journalist, and theater critic. She also promoted the work of traditional musician friends and helped co-found a local Irish Music and Dance Association.

Hart came to writing rather late, and almost by accident, when the only graduate-level courses she could find in the evening were business or creative writing. Not being mathematically inclined, Hart says, she chose writing by default. Reviewing for newspapers and radio eventually turned into her second career as a freelance arts journalist and theater critic. Throughout the 1990s, her work appeared in print in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Minnesota Monthly, and Skyway News, and for several years she was the regular on-air theater critic for Minnesota Public Radio. She also began to write memoirs, essays, and short fiction. In 1996, her short story, "Waterborne," won the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers.

Hart has traveled to Ireland a dozen times in the past 20 years. Her husband, Paddy, is a native of County Offaly. While visiting friends one summer, she heard an intriguing tale about a beautiful red-haired girl whose perfectly preserved, severed head was discovered in a desolate Irish bog. That true story was the inspiration for her debut novel Haunted Ground, the first in a planned series of crime novels set mostly in Ireland, revolving around archaeology, forensics, history, traditional music. and folklore.