Crouch, Blake: Locked Doors

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In Blake Crouch's riveting debut novel Desert Places (review) his protagonist, suspense novelist Andrew Thomas, is framed for a series of gruesome murders committed by a pair of psychopaths, one of them Andrew's twin brother Orson. The physical evidence against Andrew is too strong for him to come forward and explain himself to the authorities. Thus Crouch's sequel to Desert Places, the equally compelling Locked Doors, finds Andrew hiding from civilization seven years after the murders in a remote cabin in the Yukon. He's come to appreciate his solitary life in the wilderness, and he has some small hope of one day clearing his name: he is at least working on an autobiographical manuscript, an account of his brother's killing spree, which turns out to be the text of Crouch's first book. But Andrew's calm is interrupted by a second spate of killings, similar in style to the first, which the press is blaming on Andrew himself: the victims are people he was close to in his past. He is thus lured from his safe haven to reenter the nightmarish world of serial killer Luther Kite, his brother's accomplice, whom Andrew had left for dead at the conclusion of Desert Places.

It takes all of six and a half pages for readers to experience their first jolt of electric fear while reading Crouch's second Andrew Thomas novel. After that the scares come thick and fast. This is a book that will fly by if you let it, its seductively short chapters flashing past in an adrenaline rush of reading. But it's worth slowing down, if you can, to enjoy some of Crouch's prose and the lovely, subtle way he sometimes has of getting information across: "She peered out the window and saw the fog dissolving, the microscopic crawl of traffic now materializing on Broadway through the cloud below."

Well-written, heart-thumpingly exciting, and nearly perfect in its execution, Locked Doors is definitely a worthy successor to Desert Places. It is in fact a little easier to enjoy than its predecessor, which was so steeped in gore as to almost be unpalatable. There is more room this time around to breathe between eviscerations and hanging carcasses. But it'll still scare the pants off you.