Just like the woman in the legend that haunts her and after whom she is named, fourteen-year-old Rikst de Bruin loves beachcombing after the winter storms that bring treasures to the shores of the island where she lives. Then one day she and her friend stumble across a body on the beach and see what appears to be the ghost of Rixt, the witch of the bird sanctuary. But when they return to the beach after summoning help, the body has disappeared.
Rikst and her friends try to figure out what happened to the body, and what three mysterious strangers are doing on their small island. Rikst is particularly fascinated by the woman with long, white hair and cold, grey eyes, who she calls Ice-woman. Did she have anything to do with the disappearance of the body? Was she the apparition they saw on the beach? And what is in the large suitcases that the three strangers bring to the island from the mainland?
martha attema is the author of A Time to Choose (Orca, 1995), which won the Blue Heron Book Award, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Arthur Ellis Award and the Geoffrey Bilson Historical Fiction Award. A Light in the Dunes is her second novel.