A saga of life thirty thousand years ago during the Ice Age depicts the lives of the shaman Thorn, an outsider named Elga, and Loon, the next shaman, who is struggling to find his own path in a treacherous and uncertain world.

Captured as slaves when their village is attacked, Odion and his little sister are pursued by their tribe's war chief and other rescuers who are unaware that an evil witch-woman is responsible for the abductions.

"Kolyma Highway, otherwise known as the Road of Bones, is a 1200 mile stretch of Siberian road where winter temperatures can drop as low as sixty degrees below zero. Under Stalin, at least eighty Soviet gulags were built along the route to supply the USSR with a readily available workforce, and over time hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in the midst of their labors. Their bodies were buried where they fell, plowed under the permafrost, underneath...

Native American policeman Joe Leaphorn probes the murder of an old Indian soothsayer and a young Indian girl, and ends up investigating the strange kidnapping of a group of Boy Scouts and evading a plot on his own life.

"This is what hooks Sam when he first overhears it at a fancy dinner party in the Hollywood hills: the story of a globe-trotting shaman who claims to perform 'open-soul surgery' on emotionally damaged people. For neurotic, depressed Sam, new to Los Angeles after his life in New York imploded, the possibility of total transformation is utterly tantalizing. He's desperate for something to believe in, and the shaman--who promises ancient rituals, plant...