Niceville
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Welcome to Niceville, a sleepy, old-fashioned hamlet in America's Deep South. But don't be fooled by its pleasant exterior. 'Stephen King meets Twin Peaks' in this chilling thriller with a horror twist...
When ten-year-old Rainey Teague disappears on his way home from school, Detective Nick Kavanaugh and his team are baffled. CCTV shows Rainey staring into the window of a pawn shop – he’s there one minute and simply gone the next.
And that is only the beginning of the nightmare as a chain of terrifying events has been triggered in idyllic Niceville.
As Nick struggles to uncover what happened to Rainey, his investigation takes him deep into the history of Niceville and it soon becomes clear that there’s a much higher than average rate of abductions in this town. And there’ll be more victims to come…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thriller author Stroud (Close Pursuit) begins this shoot 'em up meets supernatural thriller with a high-speed chase between cops, a getaway car, and a news chopper that is gruesomely cut short by a conspiring sniper. The bloodbath sets in motion a three-day flurry of dimly related events, including a standoff between an accused pedophile and a SWAT team, a father caught taping his daughters in the shower, and the takedown of an anonymous tipster for his own heinous crimes. As the entangled story unravels, "random stranger abductions" continue across the small Southern town of Niceville. After a missing boy is found alive in a fresh grave, clues surface about who or what is behind it all. In this unnecessarily convoluted mind-bender, Stroud introduces key players without sufficient backstory, making differentiation difficult. The genre jargon thick prose can be campy ("Coker felt that line-of-duty death was like the jalape os on a chimichanga; it added spice to patrol work that could be pretty damn boring most of the time") and some plot twists, while intriguing, clutter rather than clarify. The ending leaves mysteries unsolved, but a pending follow-up book may provide answers, if readers are willing to return to Niceville. 100,000 announced first printing.
