Sleen Sheppard's people once believed that the soul of a thing, and the matter of it, are one in the same.

She has always held close to this belief. It led her to become a bayou tracker in her youth, and later took her to Tulane to wend her way through a checkered career as a Forensic Analyst. It is the belief held by the ancient pastoralist people of Eurasia - of the Turks, and before them, the Scythians; plains cultures that lived on horseback tracking the flocks and grazing and seasons of the steppes, lived in harmony with the land.

Sleen's paternal grandfather was half-British, born during the time of comity with the new Turkish Republic and the United Kingdom. He resided in Ankara and raised a family there, with Sleen's father serving as a military officer and ardent anti-Socialist activist during the Cold War. Dying young in a fight against the Kurdish rebels in Eastern Turkey, Captain Sheppard's family felt estranged from their homeland. Sleen's mother moved her teenage daughter and Sleen's two younger brothers to live with relatives who owned a boating business outside of Hathian.

Long in head-over-heels love with the wild, spiritual history of the Turkish people, Sleen found a home for her passion in the Louisiana bayous. The rites and traditions of the horseback archers in Turk history blended into the Cajun trapper practices - of using all of an animal, of being in tune with nature, of considering tracking to be sacred.

She'd caught and skinned an alligator by herself at age 15. At 17, Sleen was roaming through the knit of mangrove swamps and the bubble of brackish bayous on her own. Graduation found her with an aptitude for studying the tracks of an animal and the parts of their body that bordered on the religious.

Just as she had transferred her Turkish spiritual heritage to Louisiana buccaneer skills, Sleen transformed her love of tracking into a passion for Forensic analysis. Now she considers herself a hunter of humans. She gathers the marks criminals make with their knives and drugs, breaks them down and fits them with the puzzle pieces of the environment, and leads law enforcement officials toward the catch.

Though cerebral and hyper-active, Sleen's passions inform her: She is hot-headed, blunt, emotional and fierce. Her law-enforcement career landed in Hathian as scrapes with superiors have marred her otherwise outstanding record. She has published more scientific journal papers than she has arrests for assault, but not by much.

And at the core of it, Sleen is in Hathian because it is her spiritual home. It is a place of hunters and prey; a slice of wilderness in urban clothing. She loves its savagery as part of herself.