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...