At the End of the Road
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
From the critically acclaimed author of A Very Simple Crime, a chilling story of a young boy coming to grips with genuine evil.
A red dirt road on a sweltering day. A car loses control, flips through the air. A woman crawls out, bloody and battered, staggers toward the boy on the bike, the one she swerved to avoid. But he runs away...
Kyle is ten in the summer of 1976, and his world is all about secrets-secrets hidden in the maze of cornfields, in caves, in the embers of scorched earth, behind creaking doors and down basement stairs...and in the darkest of hearts.
But there's a policewoman at the front door. The Paralyzed Man watches him from a neighboring porch. And no matter which way Kyle turns, no place seems safe anymore...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jerkins follows his well-received debut, A Very Simple Crime, with a bogeyman tale that ratchets up a high level of dread the way a slasher flick does if one concentrates on the images rather than the internal logic of a porous plot. One summer day in 1976, 10-year-old Kyle Edwards on his bike and Melodie Godwin in her car barely avoid a collision on the road near Kyle's home in rural Georgia. Kyle is unhurt, but Melodie is badly injured when her car overturns. Frightened by her bloody appearance, Kyle races off. When he gets up the nerve to return to the scene of the accident the next day, there's no sign of the woman or her car. Enter the maliciously cunning Kenny Ahearn, a stroke victim known as "the paralyzed man," who sets his sights on Kyle. Sheriff's Deputy Officer Dana Turpin's search for the missing Melodie provides a ray of hope, while Ahearn's demented actions exact a terrible toll in this scary thriller.