Crouch, Blake: Desert Places

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Relaxing on the deck of his secluded, wood-bounded home after a long day at the keyboard, successful author Andrew Thomas goes through his mail--a phone bill and a stampless envelope which he suspects may be fan mail, delivered by hand. It isn't. The envelope contains a typewritten letter, only one paragraph long: "There is a body buried on your property," he reads, "covered in your blood." Thomas is directed to dig up the mouldering corpse and retrieve something from the dead woman's pocket. If he doesn't, whoever wrote the letter will feed information to the police that incriminates Thomas. A bad end to a productive day, but things get much worse for our hero from here.

Desert Places starts with a bang and doesn't let up for the next hundred-odd pages, at which point there is a section break and the reader can start breathing again, check his or her pulse, and assess the likelihood that the closet door is ajar because a psychopath is hiding behind it with a serrated knife. (Probably not, but you never know.) The book is gruesome in parts. If you don't like the occasional brain-splattered windshield in your reading, as well as cruelty toward men, women, children, and animals, you may not want to pick this one up. But if you do open the book--if only to get that scary-looking guy on the cover to stop staring at you--you won't be able to put it down.