The Night Monster
A Novel of Suspense
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
The past has come back to haunt P.I. Jack Carpenter, former head of the Broward County Missing Persons Unit. As a young cop he failed to stop the kidnapping of a college coed by a shockingly large assailant—and neither victim nor attacker was ever seen again. But eighteen years later, when his daughter, Jessie, asks him to bird-dog a creep who’s been shadowing her college basketball team, Carpenter’s pursuit of the voyeur leads him smack into another run-in with his old nemesis, who abducts one of Jessie’s teammates. With the assistance of the kidnap victim’s tycoon father and precious little time before the trail goes cold, Jack and his dog, Buster, hit the ground running—following a twisted trail from the ruins of a shuttered mental asylum with an infamous past to the streets of a sinister small town with a ghastly secret.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spock-like logic and a bullet-train paced plot drive Swain's third thriller to feature Florida PI Jack Carpenter (after Midnight Rambler and Night Stalker). When Carpenter fails to stop the brutal abduction of his daughter's college basketball teammate, he's painfully reminded of a serial abduction case he bungled 18 years before. Unearned guilt makes this latest case personal. Half-wit giant Lonnie and fellow inmate/mentor "Mouse" escape from an asylum for the criminally insane, and start seizing student nurses. Lonnie twice nearly kills Carpenter, once by tossing a 400-pound Coke machine at him. Carpenter's (and pooch Buster's) "dogged" search takes them to a small, eerie Florida townwhere the victims have been imprisoned. Bullets predictably fly when Carpenter's FBI friend, Ken Linderman, whose daughter has been abducted, pitches in to help. This installment grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go until the last page.
