The Tower

In the bestselling tradition of The Silence of the Lambs comes The Tower, a novel of nail-biting suspense and heart-stopping terror played out in a psychological battle of wit, cunning, and pure evil between a diabolically clever killer and his determined hunter.

The Tower, nicknamed "Alcatraz II" by law enforcement officials, is infamous as the world's foremost airtight extreme maximum security prison. A futuristic building, it is located offshore of San Francisco, and built to be 100 percent escape-proof. The men who are condemned to spend the rest of their lives there are the most dangerous, violent offenders in the prison system -- men whose crimes have made it imperative that they be separated from society, from one another, and from hope -- forever.

Allander Atlasia, a psychopathic killer and himself the victim of a horrible sexual attack as a child, has been sentenced to the Tower for a series of gruesome crimes. But Atlasia manages to do the impossible -- he breaks out of the prison. He makes his way to the mainland and, armed with his own private agenda of hate and murder, begins his killing spree, intent on re-enacting and revenging the childhood tortures that turned him into a monster.

Jade Marlow is an ex-FBI agent who has been assigned to hunt down and capture Atlasia. A self-described "tracker," Marlow is relentless, fearless, and brilliant -- a loose cannon in a private struggle with his own demons. With a record of irrational behavior and violence, and a kind of genius for putting himself into the mind of a criminal predator that is itself a sort of madness, Marlow may just be the only man smart and diabolical enough to catch Atlasia.

Atlasia's victims are the unfortunate bystanders in this complex story of emotional and psychological horror, as they fall prey to this madman's twisted re-enactment of his own depraved past, as he rights the wrongs he feels have been visited upon him. His message to his pursuers is delivered in a particularly chilling manner, a literal realization of the old adage "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil."

Two men -- one a sinister, inventive, pitiless serial killer, the other a brilliant sleuth and hunter who bears his own heavy burden of dark secrets and impulses -- play out a deadly game against a background of increasingly brutal murders, in which there are no rules but kill or be killed.

Superbly written, ingeniously plotted, and enormously entertaining, The Tower marks the debut of a stunning new writer.