Still Life With Crows by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

“The man strolled into the crowd, which parted silently, and halted ten feet from the sheriff.  The man spoke again, in the mellifluous accent of the deepest South.  ‘The killer works in the blackest night with no moon.  He appears and disappears without a trace.  Are you really so sure, Sheriff Hazen, that he is not from Medicine Creek?’”

Medicine Creek: just another small, dying town in the middle of Cry County, Kansas.  Nobody in Medicine Creek has a last name that starts with the letter ‘A.’  The biggest industry in the area would either be the corn or the turkey-killing plant just down the road.  There’s Smit Ludwig, the owner-reporter of the local paper; Dent Hazen, the sheriff; Corrie Swanson, the town Goth and troublemaker; and now there’s a hacked-up corpse in the middle of a circle in a cornfield.

Sheriff Hazen insists it’s just a single murder, that he and his deputy Tad have a good handle on the case, and that there is no possibility of the killer being a local.  Not two seconds later, FBI Special Agent Pendergast arrives and contradicts everything the Sheriff just declared.

More than a little irritated with the eccentric, black-clad southerner, Hazen reluctantly lets him onto the case—and things quickly take a turn for the worse.  Members of the town have started to disappear, and their bodies turn up the next day under circling clouds of vultures.  Medicine Creek is beginning to come apart at the seams, just on the eve of the arrival of the one thing that may save their town: a field of genetically engineered corn which would either be put in Medicine Creek or Deeper, just down the way….

Meanwhile, bodies continue to pile up.  Without any mode of transportation other than his own two feet, Special Agent Pendergast hires the help of local delinquent and Goth, Corrie Swanson, and her rusted, falling-apart car.  But as one murder after another turns up, Pendergast and Corrie must dig deeper into Medicine Creek’s past—and into the lives of its residents—than anyone has gone before.  Their investigation takes them to the Mounds, three hills just outside of the town itself, and into the strange story of the Forty-Fives, a brutal group of men who ranged Kansas after the Civil War.

But the real story lifts from the perfect circles in the cornfields and the grisly murders, leading Pendergast, Corrie, Sheriff Hazen, and the rest of Medicine Creek down a dark and twisted path that nobody was meant to travel, leading into the screaming blackness of the cave beneath the town… into the lair of the killer they have been trying so hard to catch.

Still Life With Crows is a stunning thrill ride, from its first page to its breathless conclusion, that will hold you in a merciless grip until the last word has been said—leaving you desperate for more.