NIGHTWALKERS

Ex-cop Cameron Richter (Spider Mountain, 2007, etc.) plays cat-and-mouse with two murderous ghosts.

Since leaving the Manceford County, N.C., sheriff’s office for private work, Cam Richter has been doing OK—actually, better than OK. The cases are interesting, even exciting on occasion, and Hide and Seek Investigations makes money with agreeable consistency. Still, Cam’s begun to detect in himself telltale signs of diminishing enthusiasm. The siren song of retirement, usually muted, becomes unexpectedly clamorous the day he happens on the For Sale sign for Glory’s End, the once elegant antebellum plantation sitting on 700 eye-catching acres in nearby Rockwell County. Spurred by restlessness, Cam buys it. Meanwhile, the first of Cam’s ghosts has been sighted. For a lawman like Cam, a ghost is someone with a grudge against a cop that won’t quit, someone prepared to haunt him until death, someone like Billie Ray Breen, just paroled from Alexander State Prison, where Cam had put him a few years back—he’s a felon who makes not the least attempt to disguise his malicious intent. Ghost No. 2, a more obscure figure that seems to be linked to the murky history of Glory’s End, tracks Cam with unnerving skill, leaving notes promising vengeance for a wrong Cam can’t remember having perpetrated. This eerily enigmatic figure worries Cam far more than Billie Ray. Better the ghost you know, he thinks.

A rousing, spirited yarn.