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Abb Grimes is famous. Just ask the ghoulish tourists who flock to his former home to take photographs. Years ago, Grimes killed eighteen women, some never found. As the head of the Broward County Missing Persons Unit, Jack Carpenter was intimately involved in the Grimes case. Now, days away from execution, the notorious serial killer reaches out to ex-cop Carpenter with a surprising request.
Abb Grimes’ grandson was lured from his home. The cops are convinced the boy’s father–Abb’s troubled son, Jed–is behind the boy’ s disappearance, but Jack’s not so sure. With a personal connection to the kidnapped child, Carpenter takes the case, and that’s when the situation goes from terrifying to fatal. There’s another gruesome murder, and once again the evidence points straight to Jed. Have the unspeakable sins of his father taken root within this troubled young man?
Carpenter races against time and a police department that wants his help but rejects his aggressive style as he searches through an underworld of predators, assembling the jagged pieces of a depraved puzzle, desperate to put an end to a murderous stalker’ s blood-soaked rampage.
With unremitting action and skillfully polished prose, bestselling author James Swain has written his most riveting thriller yet, delving even deeper into the fascinating psyche of misbehaving crusader Jack Carpenter. A hero immersed in the evil that is his prey, Carpenter battles a stunning betrayal–and a horrendous danger no one saw coming.
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Publisher
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Release date
September 30, 2008 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780345509444
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780345509444
- File size: 2166 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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August 18, 2008
What crime fiction fan can resist a guy who isn't afraid to knock a few slime-bag heads when no one is watching? In Swain's fine second suspense novel to feature South Florida PI Jack Carpenter (after Midnight Rambler
), imprisoned serial killer Abb Grimes hires the tough, unrelenting ex-cop to find his kidnapped grandson, Sampson Grimes. The chief suspect is the child's father, Jed Grimes, but Jack thinks Jed is innocent, even though the evidence suggests otherwise. There's plenty of action and intelligent sleuthing, but it's Jack's uncompromising character and Swain's equally uncompromising writing that will keep readers turning pages and eager for the next installment: “I'd visited many prisons, and the smell was always the same: a choking mixture of piss, shit, fear, and desperation, wiped down by harsh antiseptics.” The winner of France's Prix Calibre 38, Swain is also the author of Deadman's Bluff
and six other books in his Tony Valentine gambling series. -
October 1, 2008
Former cop turned PI Jack Carpenter specializes in recovering abducted children, but somehow child abductions seem to lead him to serial killers. So it was in Midnight Rambler (2007), and so it is here. This time Jack is asked by a convicted serial killer to find his grandson, who has been abducted just days before his father is scheduled to be executed. Carpenters efforts bring confrontations with a crooked cop, an Internet chat group of child abductors, and ultimately another serial killer. Similarities with Midnight Rambler abound: the locale of Broward County, Florida, portrayed as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah; Jacks edgy relationship with his former employer and its police officers; and his dramatic, intuitive leaps in solving cases. But Swains claw-hammer-direct narrative style, his utterly relentless pacing, plenty of plot twists, and the steadfastness of his hero make this a page-turner that is hard to put down. Swain, the author of the Tony Valentine series, looks to have another winner.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)
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