Where Serpents Lie - Hardcover

Parker, T. Jefferson

3.87

855 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786215267 ISBN 13: 9780786215263

Publisher: Thorndike Pr, 1998

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When Terry Naughton, a cop with a mysterious past, confronts Horridus, a psychopath who kidnaps children and returns them in period clothing accompanied by a piece of snakeskin, he is desperate to apprehend the madman to atone for past mistakes

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Review:

What novelist T. Jefferson Parker does so well in Where Serpents Lie (and in such previous high-octane outings as Laguna Heat and Pacific Beat) is to bind his characters tightly to the territory in which they live and die--the mostly scorched and urbanized but occasionally still pristine turf of Southern California's Orange County. When he's not running the Crimes Against Youth unit at the Orange County Sheriff's Department, Terry Naughton sits in a cave in Laguna Canyon, drinking tequila, smoking cigars, and trying to understand the twisted mind of a particularly vicious child molester called The Horridus. The serpents of the title are real, as is the terror Parker manages to evoke with the intense power of his writing. "I knew that there was no way that Lauren would ever have her childhood replaced with a better one," Naughton says about a 9- year-old girl sold for sex by her parents. "Lauren had the resigned eyes and the aura of passive invincibility found in nearly all children who have escaped to the last place they can go--to the private, silent cave of their own selves."

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He takes them from their beds at night and releases them unharmed within a day--dressed like little angels with a piece of snakeskin tucked into the folds of their gowns as a memento. They are blindfolded and gagged throughout the ordeal, so they cannot describe their captor--nor do they know what happened while they were in his care. (Thank God.)
Terry Naughton, head of Orange County's Crimes Against Youth unit, faces the challenge of a lifetime when children are being kidnapped but released--and the people of Southern California are terrified for their safety. The cops don't know what the criminal wants--but they do know that his brand of psychotic behavior always escalates in scale. Will the next child never come back?

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