Son of Destruction
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A spellbinding American Southern Gothic thriller with a supernatural twist - a past secret has the power to destroy the future . . . - When Lucy Cartaret dies, her journalist son Dan returns to her hometown, Fort Jude, Florida, in search of his real father, claiming he's here to investigate the mysterious deaths of three elderly women. Spontaneous human combustion, experts say. But why? Surely it's more than coincidence - and what links these deaths to Dan's mother? It soon becomes clear that something terrible happened during his mother's last year in town, thirty years before. But the social elite of Fort Jude are tight-lipped. The families who run the town will do anything to protect their own - anything.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This fascinating paranormal detective novel from literary fantasist Reed (What Wolves Know) shows a young man pursuing dangerous family secrets. The death of Dan Carteret's mother frees him to track down the father he never knew. Pretending to research a series of deaths by spontaneous human combustion, Dan travels to the Florida town of Fort Jude and starts asking residents whether they knew his mother. They all did but they try to hide guilty memories of what they did to her or didn't do for her. Dan's father knows that his anger probably gives him the ability to ignite people with his mind, so he is desperate to acknowledge his son while also protecting him from knowledge of the terrible power he may have inherited. The characters reveal themselves in overlapping chapters that give a convincing picture of community interaction. The story is only marred by a disappointing ending: when father and son do connect at last, the emotional conflagration is much less intense than readers would expect.
