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A Novel
by Carsten Stroud
One fine spring day in Niceville, a young boy named Rainey Teague disappears on his way home from school. Literally disappears - security camera footage captures the moment of his instant, inexplicable vanishing. The search for the boy is led by ex-Special Forces veteran Nick Kavanaugh, now a detective with the local police and no stranger to lowlifes and their criminal hijinks. In the nightmare that follows Rainey's disappearance, Nick and his wife, Kate, a family practice lawyer, find themselves drawn into a shadow world between life and death, where they will come face-to-face with an ancient malevolent power that lies beneath Niceville, darker and older than the mountain forest surrounding its source: a 1,000-foot-deep pit known as Crater Sink.
"In this unnecessarily convoluted mind-bender, Stroud introduces key players without sufficient backstory, making differentiation difficult." - Publishers Weekly
"Stroud's combination of the supernatural with the hyperrealistic never quite jells, but, on balance, he literally gives plenty of bang for the buck. A generous collection of memorable villains, tight action sequences, and an occasional bit of black humor are enough to keep readers turning pages." - Booklist
"Stroud's latest is booming..." - Library Journal
"Terrific dialogue, oddball characters, and a wild story make this a great read." - Elmore Leonard, author of Get Shorty and Out of Sight
"Carsten Stroud's hard-boiled and engrossing Niceville rockets around its deceptively staid southern town, pulling bad guys and worse guys and long-ago misdeeds into a widening and unfolding tale about every kind of wickedness. Somehow it manages to get tighter, nastier, and more delightful as it rolls along toward its lovely and completely black-hearted final pages." - Peter Straub
This information about Niceville was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Carsten Stroud is a seasoned writer of fiction and nonfiction, including the true crime account Close Pursuit, a New York Times best seller when it was published almost twenty-five years ago. His novels include Sniper's Moon, Lizard, Skin, Black Water Transit, Cuba Strait, and Cobraville. Visit him online at www.carstenstroudbooks.com.
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