Otto Penzler Books
2 total works
George Gates is a former travel writer. He used to specialize in writing about places where people disappeared, sometimes individuals, sometimes whole societies. Now, since the murder of his eight-year-old son, Gates has written gentler stories for the town paper about flower festivals and local celebrities. Enter Arlo MacBride, a retired missing persons detective who, knowing Gates' past, mentions the case of Katherine Carr, a woman who vanished twenty years before, leaving nothing behind but a few poems and a strange story. It is this story that spurs Gates to inquire into its missing author's brief life and dire fate, an exploration that leads him to discoveries about life and death, mystery and resolution.
Thomas H. Cook returns to his home territory in this Southern Gothic mystery set in Alabama. Luke Paige, historian and writer, is signing his latest work in a bookstore when in the queue he spots a woman he hoped never to see again. Lola Faye was once his father's secret lover, the destroyer of his childhood. For her husband shot Luke's father dead, and his mother died soon after. Lola Faye wants to talk - and talk - over a drink, that becomes dinner, and then another drink. Slowly, painfully, Luke and Lola revisit the terrible events that have shaped their lives. The story they reveal is one of the timeless struggle between fathers and sons; of longed-for passion; of hopes and dreams thwarted by fate and circumstances. This is Southern Gothic at its most compelling.