Coldwater
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Having forfeited his youth to the state prison system, Michael moved back to the only home he'd ever known. An empty shell of a man who now lived--if it could be called living--in the still vacant house of his parents in a town with one stoplight. A town that hated him. Had always hated him. And was ready to pick up where the prison system had let off.
Now he's on the run from men who've tried to kill him once; but Michael is more than an ex-con. A powerful, sinister force creeps inside him, threatening and destructive. Who--and what--it will destroy next is the only real question. From the bold voice that brought readers down Purgatory Road comes a new pulse-pounding, spine-rattling tale of vengeance and justice that will have them up all night.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Parker follows his well-received debut, Purgatory Road, with an overwrought suspense novel. Michael Sullivan, a recently released convict, was heading home to Coldwater, a remote town in an unnamed state, when he ran into a group of vengeful men who buried him alive in a forest. Michael manages to dig himself out of the ground, but more ordeals lie ahead, as the people of Coldwater have always hated him for murdering his younger brother as a child years earlier. Even his sister makes a special trip back to Coldwater to kill him. Scraps of Michael's memories alternate with fitful glimpses into the minds of his hunters, each of whom embodies a different facet of mob violence. Amid all the philosophizing about guilt and innocence, rage and regret, crime and punishment, Parker clumsily injects a supernatural complication: demonic possession. Lurid images and often muddled prose ("he carried an absorbed twin in his cells which whispered despair") make Michael's sad story a bathetic, not tragic, comment on the inevitable wages of sin.
