A ghost story forces a man to confront the darkest secret of his past
Christmas is lonely for a man with no family, and Mike North is grateful when his boss invites him to spend the holiday at his cabin upstate. But as a blizzard descends and conversation dries up, Mike regrets leaving New York City. Only the arrival of Susannah, his boss’s daughter, saves him from going mad with boredom. She is quick-witted and beautiful, a perfect antidote to snow-bound tedium, and he begins to fall in love. For Christmas night entertainment, Mike invents a ghost story. It goes all right until Susannah starts to scream. Something in his half-baked melodrama about a Chicago serial killer haunted by a man with a scarred face has touched a nerve. Unknowingly, Mike described a scene that matches Susannah’s nightmares. Soon, what had been a dream begins to intrude into reality. To understand her terror, Mike digs into his own memory, hoping to unearth the secret that gave birth to the scarred man.
Andrew Klavan (b. 1954) is a highly successful author of thrillers and hard-boiled mysteries. Born in New York City, Klavan was raised on Long Island and attended college at the University of California at Berkeley. He published his first novel, Face of the Earth, in 1977, and continued writing mysteries throughout the eighties, finding critical recognition when The Rain (1988) won an Edgar Award for best new paperback.
Besides his crime fiction, Klavan has distinguished himself as an author of supernatural thrillers, most notably Don’t Say a Word (1991), which was made into a film starring Michael Douglas. He has two ongoing series: Weiss and Bishop, a private-eye duo who made their debut in Dynamite Road (2003), and The Homelanders, a young-adult series about teenagers who fight radical Islam. Besides his fiction, Klavan writes regular opinion pieces for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. He lives in Southern California.