If you open your house to strangers, who knows who might come in. And what they might be after. Or whom. Now, ponder the unthinkable and surrender to your darkest dread, as sinister storyteller extraordinaire John Saul weaves a heart-stopping tale of lurking terror and twisted intent. Every parent’s nightmare becomes reality for Kara Marshall when her daughter, Lindsay, vanishes from her bedroom during the night. The police suspect that the girl is just another moody teenage runaway, angry over leaving behind her school and friends because her family is moving. But Lindsay’s recent eerie claim–that someone invaded her room when the house was opened to prospective buyers–drives Kara to fear the worst: a nameless, faceless stalker has walked the halls of her home in search of more than a place to live. Patrick Shields recognizes Kara’s pain–and carries plenty of his own since he lost his wife and two children in a devastating house fire. But more than grief draws Patrick and Kara together. He, too, senses the hand of a malevolent stranger in this tragedy. And as more people go missing from houses up for sale, Patrick’s suspicion, like Kara’s, blooms into horrified certainty. Someone is trolling this peaceful community–undetected and undeterred–harvesting victims for a purpose no sane mind can fathom. Someone Kara and Patrick, alone and desperate, are determined to unmask. Someone who is even now watching, plotting, keeping a demented diary of unspeakable deeds . . . and waiting until the time is ripe for another fateful visit. Saul's take on the sexual-psychopath thriller, whose grand master is surely Thomas Harris in Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988), and whose unacknowledged master is Whitley Strieber in Billy (1990), is a more disquieting book than Saul may have intended. As a literary performance, it doesn't give Harris and Strieber much competition, for its Long Island setting and relentlessly middle-class characters lead Saul into bland prose and shallow psychology. And the mainspring of its plot--who has snatched two pretty teen girls and a twentysomething young mother?--is unexceptional and generically shopworn. Fortunately, by interspersing the thoughts of the perverted perp throughout a third-person text otherwise following either the mother of the second girl kidnapped or the girl herself, Saul adds considerable nasty fascination, though that fascination affords the kind of pleasure that many may think they damn well ought to feel guilty about. What is genuinely upsetting about the book is its depressing implication that hands held out in loving compassion are precisely what shouldn't be trusted. That rather flies in the face of the mother's love that drives the main character (who is eminently trustworthy), and it makes for a brackish, disturbing ending. Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Perfect Nightmare is John Saul’s thirty-second novel. His first novel, Suffer the Children, published in 1977, was an immediate million-copy seller. His other bestselling suspense novels include Black Creek Crossing, Midnight Voices, The Manhattan Hunt Club, Nightshade, The Right Hand of Evil, The Presence, Black Lightning, Guardian, and The Homing. He is also the author of the New York Times bestselling serial thriller The Blackstone Chronicles, initially published in six installments but now available in one complete volume. Saul divides his time between Seattle, Washington, and Hawaii. Chapter One Kara Marshall glanced surreptitiously at her watch and wondered if there were any way—any tactful way—to get Claire Sollinger to eat just a little faster. But of course there wasn’t; everyone in Camden Green knew that if you had lunch with Claire, it was going to be at least a two-hour event. Not that Kara minded. She and Claire had known each other ever since Claire had turned up as a volunteer for her project to restore the old town square to the park it had been before succumbing to the “modernization” of the post–World War II era when Camden Green, along with a dozen other towns along the north shore of Long Island, had decided to pin their future to the automobile and ripped out the old square in favor of a parking lot. The plan hadn’t worked: ten years after the lot went in, so did the mall on the southern edge of town, and parking lot or not, Camden Green’s downtown had gone the way of dozens of others. At least it had until she and a few of her friends decided to change things, and organized a committee to rebuild the square in an effort to revitalize the town. Claire Shields Sollinger had shown up at that first meeting. A silence fell over the room when she walked in, for no one expected anyone from the huge mansions in the Flinders Beach area along the shore to come to the meeting. Give money, yes. But not come to the meetings, let alone do any actual work. But there Claire had been, and after looking around at the shocked faces,