The Whistlers

High school English teacher and paranormal scholar Ward Courier publishes a story collection in 1999 based on supernatural folklore and interviews with witnesses in his native upstate New York. He is shocked in 2007 when he and his book draw attention from high levels of American law enforcement. His work has foreshadowed some strange events:
– Tourist disappearances along the Tex-Mex border spark rumors of an active sacrificial cult.
– Psychologists on several continents report the recurring theme of mute, blind, sinister beggars haunting the nightmares and recovered memories of their patients. Street people of the same description start appearing in many parts of the world. 
– The DEA tracks a new drug whose effects include the momentary activation of ESP. Suspected of South American origin, its North American distribution hub is Buffalo, NY. 
– The FBI tracks a brutal criminal syndicate that deals in ancient Native American artifacts.
– Three Ohio pothunters dig a human jaw made of quartz crystal out of a Hopewell earthwork and are found dead after sadistic interrogations.
– Anthropologists disappear after finding a Crystal Skull in a ruined Mayan city. An American relief team comes upon a deserted estate and an Aztec-style rack holding dozens of heads, some only days old. A confiscated surveillance video holds only one impossible clue to the case.
– Archaeologists excavating a tomb near Cayabamba, Peru find altars dedicated to an insectoid vampire-god. Their guides desert, and the stranded team calls for help.
– “The Old Man of the Mountain,” a blind mystic in a cavern, dreams in a pose of prayer that has lasted since the Crusades. Sometimes he laughs in his sleep, as he surely did on September 11, 2001.
These are the threads that draw author Ward Courier into three current investigations and launch the sprawling, five-year, two-volume saga of paranormal adventure that is Mason Winfield’s “The Whistlers.”
Mason Winfield is widely acknowledged as upstate New York’s specialist in supernatural and paranormal subjects. Admirers of his research have been waiting for his first novel. 
A Paranormal Intrigue and its sequel The Lord of the Dawn (Fall 2017) are unusual books. Scenes are direct and graphic, but the plot moves in feints, fades, tangents, hints and suggestions. The text is seldom dense, but the books are highly philosophical and speculative for the genre. “The Whistlers” tells its tale in episodes of several types: 
– Slices-of-time with quirky American undercover agent Jason “Swingo” Jonas on his pursuit of an antiquities ring
– Reflections of narrator Ward Courier
– Courier’s reprinted literature - stories, articles and book excerpts
– Episodes in Courier’s roller-coaster affair with the dazzling, maddening Lys Mall
– Slices-of-time with the American undercover team tracking the ESP-drug, the mysterious “savvy.”
– Courier’s interviews with representatives of the FBI and DEA that serve as paranormal crash courses for the reader
– Courier’s dialogues with his mystical Seneca friend Rick Reynard, whose Native American insights open astonishing new windows into the paranormal.
Ultimately “The Whistlers” is a clash of forces whose players are only suggested. Those supporting the human and earthly order may have Masonic/Rosicrucian sources and alliances with indigenous tradition. As for the shadow looming over “The Whistlers,” the imagery suggests sacrificial gods, echelons of demonic helpers, and even inter-dimensional beings. Permeating it all are these Whistlers, the ragged vagrants we never get to know too well. 
Adventure, spirituality, occultism, and outright bloody horror... By the time of “The Whistlers” dynamic payoff, we may be just ready to believe in an apocalyptic conspiracy older than civilization and even sourced in another world.