The painted drum

When a woman named Faye Travers is called upon to appraise the estate of a family in her small New Hampshire town, she isn’t surprised to discover a forgotten cache of valuable Native American artifacts. After all, the family descends from an Indian agent who worked on the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation that is home to her mother’s family. However, she stops dead in her tracks when she finds in the collection a rare drumba powerful yet delicate object, made from a massive moose skin stretched across a hollow of cedar, ornamented with symbols she doesn’t recognize and dressed in red tassels and a beaded belt and skirtbespecially since, without touching the instrument, she hears it sound. And so begins an illuminating journey both backward and forward in time, following the strange passage of a powerful yet delicate instrument, and revealing the extraordinary lives it has touched and defined.