Sullen and withdrawn, homesick and angry, fourteen-year-old Eliot Gardener has been headed for trouble ever since his family moved from Nova Scotia to the damp, grey Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. But not like this. Not standing on the bramble-choked, blood-soaked beach where his parents lie murdered--and his sister slashed--by the machete he has turned on them...and can't remember why!

Some say Eliot is a bad seed. RCMP Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg doesn't buy that. But the case weights heavily on him, for he knew the Gardeners and he should have seen something coming. And now, poisoning the joy of his and Cassandra Mitchell's wedding plans, a piece of his own past--the survivor of another shattered family--is stalking him. Someone else he's failed. Someone who wants revenge.

And until he can lay to rest the madness of that past, Alberg cannot hope to enter the silent mind of Eliot, where a time bomb is ticking away.

L.R. Wright's profile page

L.R. Wright died in February 2001. She is the author of fourteen previous novels. She twice won the Arthur Ellis Award for A Chill Rain in January and for Mother Love, which also won the Canadian Authors Association Award for literary fiction. She received the coveted Edgar Allan Poe Best Novel Award, for The Suspect.