The Midnight Knock
A Novel
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
A locked-room mystery meets white-knuckle horror in this mind-bending thriller, where strangers must survive a deadly night in a remote Texas motel.
In the frigid west Texas desert, weary travelers converge at a lonely roadside motel nestled at the foot of a massive mountain. Ethan and Hunter have left behind a corpse, a fire, and a horrific act of violence. Kyla and Fernanda are fleeing for the border. Stanley and his granddaughter are returning from Mexico with a mysterious man in hot pursuit. All of them are on the run from something. All of them are hiding something.
And somehow, they’re all connected to the motel’s other guest, an enigmatic woman named Sarah Powers.
Within hours, Sarah is dead. The strange twins who run the Brake Inn Motel inform the surviving guests that her murder demands justice. The guests are given an ultimatum: uncover the killer by midnight—or die when the protective lights around the motel go out.
Because something very old and very dangerous lurks in this corner of the desert. And it’s hungry.
But nothing at the Brake Inn Motel is quite as it seems. As time ticks away, alliances fracture, secrets unravel, and the guests will not only have to confront the violence of the past—they will need to face the darkness within themselves.
A masterful blend of psychological tension, supernatural horror, and layered storytelling, The Midnight Knock pushes the boundaries of what a mystery can be. And with its unforgettable climax, this novel cements John Fram as a contemporary master of the genre.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
And Then There Were None meets The Twilight Zone in Fram's inventive latest (after No Road Home). The action opens with a handsome man named Hunter wandering into an auto body shop in the moribund town of Ellersby, Tex., and demanding a job from shop owner Ethan. Six weeks later, the pair are headed for California, leaving behind "a corpse sprawled on a couch in the spare room upstairs and a string of fires burning in the engine bays." After a diner patron advises the men against driving on Dust Road, claiming it can get "hungry" and trap desperate travelers, they're forced to take it anyway, only to run out of gas near the Brake Inn Motel, where 12 people vanished 50 years earlier. There, Hunter and Ethan gradually meet seven other guests, including two friends rushing to the Mexican border and a woman and her grandfather fleeing a motorcycle-driving stranger. When people start dying and the guests realize they can't leave, their individual predicaments converge into a supernatural locked-room nightmare. Fram keeps even savvy readers guessing about where he's headed next and manages to flesh out each member of the book's large cast. The result is wickedly satisfying.
