THE BOY IN THE WOODS

A best-selling author, long haunted by the formative experience that launched his career, is threatened anew by the monstrous figure behind it all.

At 44, Tommy Devereaux has led what most people would call a successful life as a devoted husband and father—except for that one time two years ago when he betrayed his wife, Becky, for a fling with his personal assistant—and a well-known writer of thrillers. As he’s signing books one day, he gets a note from a woman he was just chatting with: “You didn’t even change my name.” In a flash he realizes that the woman, suitably disguised, was Elizabeth, whom he last saw one day 30 years ago when he and his high school buddies Mark Singletary and Jason Covington, hanging out in the Oregon woods, were approached by a red-haired girl a few years older with a 10-year-old boy in tow. Elizabeth brazenly flirted with them, and then, as Tommy and his friends watched in horror, she brought herself to orgasm by pleasuring herself with the 10-year-old—and then murdered him. To make things even worse, a masked man accompanying her forced the witnesses at gunpoint to bury the corpse after mingling their blood on a knife that would provide damning DNA evidence against them. Now that she’s read Tommy’s fictional version of the crime in the teaser chapter of his forthcoming novel The Blood of the Young, Elizabeth is determined that he tell her real story as a serial killer of 38 victims (the toll will shortly rise)—and woe betide him whether or not he obeys her.

Wilson (Final Crossing, 2013) provides serious shivers for readers who can overlook the gaping logic holes in setup and execution.