The astonishing final installment in the page-turning trilogy that Stephen King calls “an authentic work of American genius.” Niceville has an almost unearthly beauty when the sun tops the ancient nearby mountain called Tallulah’s Wall and bathes it in soft Southern light. But there’s a reason Native American tribes avoided the place: An absence that inhabits the air and the depthless “sink” atop Tallulah’s Wall. This “Nothing” has long bent time and the desires of a chosen few to her shadowy ends. As THE RECKONING begins, Detective Nick Kavanaugh and his wife, family lawyer Kate, have accepted that reality in Niceville is not normal. Seemingly, they’ve fought Nothing to a draw. But now a buzzing emerges in the heads of some perfectly normal folks. Nothing isn’t finished. Come to Niceville and sink into Carsten Stroud’s inimitable blend of crime and supernatural thriller, as characters you’ll love throw in with bad guys you’ll like way more than you should as they battle evil. “ The Reckoning is brilliantly written and hypnotically readable. I’m amazed by the sheer energy and scope of the thing. It crosses genre boundaries with perfect confidence, jumping the crevasses that swallow lesser writers. . . . In my mind, Niceville has earned a place with some of the great destinations in the Land of Make Believe, like Middle Earth, Narnia, and Arkham.” --Stephen King Carsten Stroud is the author of the New York Times bestselling true crime account Close Pursuit . His other novels include Niceville , T he Homecoming , Sniper's Moon , Lizard Skin, Black Water Transit, Cuba Strait, and Cobraville . He lives in Florida and Toronto. In the fall of 1814, under a harvest moon, the people of Niceville came together on the banks of the Tulip to talk about the evils that had come upon their town and to consider what should be done about them. Amity Suggs, the minister, said it was God’s Holy Wrath. Dr. Cullen said there was something in the water. The mix-breed John Brass said that a Kalona Ayeliski, a Raven Mocker demon, had always been in this place and the town should be abandoned. The debate went back and forth. In the end the elders decided. Naming calls. God will shield the righteous. Sinners will be taken. Go about your day’s work as Christians and let the pagan nights go about theirs. For over two hundred years this covenant held up. Then, on one rainy Friday night in October, it all went straight to Hell. Friday night, nine-thirty, and everybody in the Morrison family was safely tucked away in their white stucco home at 1329 Palisade Drive in The Glades. The Glades was a prewar Art Deco neighborhood in the northwest corner of Niceville. It had started out as Old Hollywood and gotten a lot older by staying there. The Glades had shady curving lanes lined with palms and cypress and live oak trees. The rain streaming down put a misty halo around all the streetlamps and hammered on the red tile roofs of the houses. The gutters were choking on leaves and muddy water. A thick fog drifted through the trees. The warm air was heavy with the graveyard scent of wet earth. Inside the Morrison house everything was serene and cozy, dinner done, the day ending well. Doug, the dad, was a short round man with a friendly streak, a forensic tech with the Niceville PD. Ellen, the mom, was a neonatal nurse at Our Lady of Sorrows down in Cap City. Jared, the eleven-year-old son—skinny, big-eared, with shaggy brown hair—was flat on his stomach in front of the 52-inch Samsung. An immense and overweight Maine Coon cat named Mildred Pierce was stretched out along his spine, the huge cat purring like a well-tuned motor. And Ava, the fifteen-year-old daughter, was tucked away up in her shell-pink bedroom with the door locked, leaning in to her iMac, Skyping with Julia, her latest OMG-BFF, gleefully slagging the new girl in their class at Sacred Heart High. Ava, black hair and blue eyes, had a body that a loving God would never have issued to a fifteen-year-old, and she was only dimly aware of the power it radiated. She was on the cheerleading squad at Sacred Heart and loved to taunt the players at the Sunday-afternoon football games. Weekdays, after school, she went out in the town with her friends, strolling the Galleria Mall, riding the Peachtree Line trolleys in their navy blue Sacred Heart tunics and their scarlet blazers with the school crest. They hiked the tunics up too high as soon as they were out of school, showed lots of pale white thigh and knee socks, deliberately careless of how they sat, feeling all the eyes on them, savoring the burn. Well, everybody is doing it, aren’t they, is what Ava would have said if you’d asked her, because she had no clue whatsoever about the risks they were running. The cops figured Ava probably never heard what was happening downstairs—the doorbell ringing or whatever it was—because she was up in her room with the headphones on, busy with her Sky