Box Nine

A narcotics detective wages war against a deadly new stimulant The drug is called Lingo, and it’s the most powerful narcotic Lenore has ever seen. This cheaply manufactured pill races straight for the brain’s language center, supercharging it so that even a dimwitted person can speak and read at 1,500 words per minute. It induces giddiness, confidence, and sexual euphoria—with a side effect of murderous rage. The drug has come to Quinsigamond, a fading industrial center in the heart of Massachusetts, and it’s going to tear this town apart. Lenore believes she can stop that from happening. A narcotics detective with a few addictions of her own—amphetamines and heavy metal, to name a couple—she loves nothing more than her gun, until she meets Dr. Frederick Woo, the linguist assisting her on the case. Together they can stop the drug—if it doesn’t take hold of them first.

Jack O'Connell (b. 1959) is the author of five critically acclaimed, New York Times-bestselling crime novels. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, O'Connell's earliest reading was the dime novel paperbacks and pulp fiction sold in his corner drug store, whose hard-boiled attitude he carried over to his own writing. He has cited his hometown's bleak, crumbling infrastructure as an influence on Quinsigamond, the fictional city where his first four novels were set, and whose decaying industrial landscape served as a backdrop for strange thrillers which earned O'Connell a reputation as a "cyberpunk Dashiell Hammett."
O'Connell's most recent novel was The Resurrectionist (2008). A former student at Worcester's College of the Holy Cross, he now teaches there, not far from where he and his family live just outside of his hometown.