Moon Dance

When young Carrie DuPre travels from Berkeley, Calif., to the South Dakota Badlands to search out the true story of the Laramie Ripper--a mass-murderer reputed to have killed his victims by evisceration--she gets a lot more than she (and perhaps the reader) bargains for. The secrets she discovers connect Austro-Hungarian werewolf immigration and 100 years of Native American wolf-worship, and will change her life forever. In her investigation of the showdown between shaman and werewolf, Carrie is joined by Preston Bluefeather Grumiaux, her old high school flame, who now works as a part-time tribal policeman and also at the Szymanowski Institute, which happens to be the present home of the Laramie Ripper. Flashing between the present, the early 1960s and the late 1880s, its narration occasionally long-winded, Somtov's ( Vampire Nation ) novel offers a complex horror experience, rich in atmosphere and history--not to mention animal sexuality and a great deal of gore. (Jan.)