A mental patient escapes his institution in search of bloody vengeance
When rain falls on the mental hospital, Calvin Duggai knows it’s time to leave. Institutionalized after he abandoned five men to die in the Mojave Desert, he has spent years planning escape and revenge. For months he has tunneled through the asylum’s bathroom wall, waiting for a night when rain will cover his tracks. As water soaks the grounds of the silent institution, Duggai punches a hole in the stucco wall and creeps out onto the building’s ledge. After a mistimed leap, he limps to the chain link fence with a cracked knee. As he scales the twelve-foot barbed-wire fence, he ignores the searing pain. The men who sent him away must be punished. Duggai has four doctors to kill.
The author of more than seventy books, Brian Garfield (1939–2018) is one of the country’s most prolific writers of thrillers, westerns, and other genre fiction. Raised in Arizona, Garfield found success at an early age, publishing his first novel when he was only eighteen. After time in the army, a few years touring with a jazz band, and earning an MA from the University of Arizona, he settled into writing full-time.
Garfield served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and the Western Writers of America, the only author to have held both offices. Nineteen of his novels have been made into films, including Death Wish (1972), The Last Hard Men (1976), and Hopscotch (1975), for which he wrote the screenplay. To date, his novels have sold over twenty million copies worldwide.