Book #60 - Desert Places

After finishing Stirred, I wanted more background on the Crouch characters in it, so I grabbed Desert Places. It’s the first part of the story of Andrew Thomas. He’s relaxing at his home in North Carolina when he gets a note. It tells him that a body is buried on his property. The body of someone recently killed in the area, and he’s instructed to follow a path out to Denver.

He plans to turn the tables on the killer, but he’s drugged and abducted, taken to a remote cabin. He guesses it’s somewhere out west, but it isn’t until later that he figures out it’s in Wyoming. The kidnapper is his long lost brother, who he thought was dead.

His brother is a serial killer, and he’s trying to turn Thomas into one with techniques he’s tried on another. Eventually Thomas is let go, and returns home, with the warning that Orson’s (his brother) first protégé knows about Thomas’ neighbor and will kill him. He begins tracking down his brother, and eventually finds him teaching at a Vermont college. The neighbor and Thomas go up there to kidnap him, but the neighbor is killed.

Thomas takes his brother back to the cabin, kidnapped, becoming the killer he didn’t plan on. He doesn’t think he is, but his actions show his brother was somewhat successful in turning him to a killer in desperation. At the cabin, and snowstorm, there’s a showdown that includes Luther Kite, who appears in Stirred.

An exciting, twisted, horror novel, but written well.