Fever House
A Novel
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Exciting, suspenseful, horrifying, and written at a flurry-of-punches pace. Read Fever House now.”—STEPHEN KING
A small-time criminal. A has-been rock star. A shadowy government agency. And a severed hand whose dark powers threaten to destroy them all.
A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
When leg-breaker Hutch Holtz rolls up to a rundown apartment complex in Portland, Oregon, to collect overdue drug money, a severed hand is the last thing he expects to find stashed in the client’s refrigerator. Hutch quickly realizes that the hand induces uncontrollable madness: Anyone in its proximity is overcome with a boundless compulsion for violence. Within hours, catastrophic forces are set into motion: Dark-op government agents who have been desperately hunting for the hand are on Hutch’s tail, more of the city’s residents fall under its brutal influence, and suddenly all of Portland stands at the precipice of disaster. . . .
But it’s all the same for Katherine Moriarty, a singer whose sudden fame and precipitous downfall were followed by the mysterious death of her estranged husband—suicide, allegedly. Her trauma has made her agoraphobic, shackled within the confines of her apartment. Her son, Nick, has moved home to care for her, quietly making his living working for Hutch’s boss.
When Hutch calls Nick in distress, looking for someone else to take the hand, Katherine and Nick are plunged into a global struggle that will decimate the walls of the carefully arranged life they’ve built. Mother and son must evade both crazed, bloodthirsty masses and deceitful government agents while exorcising family secrets that have risen from the dead—secrets, they soon discover, that might hold the very key to humanity’s survival.
Can you resist the hand? Find an excerpt from the next Fever House novel, The Devil by Name, at the end of the book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stellar supernatural thriller, Rosson (Road Seven) makes suspending disbelief easy by creating plausible, multidimensional characters who just happen to get caught up in the chaos surrounding a dangerous relic. Hutch Holtz and Tim Reed work as debt collectors for loan shark Peach Serrano in Portland, Ore. When Holtz and Reed go to strong-arm Wesley, a drug addict who owes Serrano $12,000, their thoughts are invaded by a powerful negative aura like "an itch in the dark meat of the skull." They trace the sensation to a severed hand that Wesley keeps inside a Wonder Bread bag and decide to take it along to their boss. That choice leads to some unexpected consequences, as proximity to the hand triggers murderous instincts. Rosson ups the suspense by intercutting this story line with transcriptions of an interrogation by a covert U.S. intelligence agency of a being named Michael, who's asked to use his remote-viewing abilities to help locate the hand. Sophisticated characterizations—even brutish Holtz and Reed are imbued with a degree of sympathy—distinguish this page-turner. The result should win Rosson a legion of new fans.