Toyer

Vanity Fair has called playwright Gardner McKay "a terrifying talent". Now McKay unleashes a stunningly original novel that weaves together the haunting landscape and shattered lives of L.A. with the icy terror spread by a diabolical villain...

HE DOESN'T KILL, HE DESTROYS.

Toyer doesn't kill. Instead, he leaves his victims with their physical beauty. And he leaves them cut off from their minds, their spirits, their hearts...

HE DOESN'T TORTURE, HE TOYS.

Maude Garance is the neurologist trying to resurrect Toyer's victims. As she speaks to those who care for them, pleads with those who should be avenging them, her quest for justice spirals into obsession...

This is not a horror thriller for the cozy lover. Not that playwright and Hawaiian Public Radio personality Gardner McKay's Toyer is gory, but this debut novel pulls some terrifying strings. Toyer is a "serial-lunatic" in Los Angeles who doesn't kill or rape his beautiful female victims. Instead, he "toys" with them psychologically and uses a surgical instrument to place them in a coma. Neurologist Maude Garance is Toyer's opposite. She has treated his victims and considers herself in a personal battle against his sadism. Because Toyer is not technically a killer, the police department and the district attorney could only charge him with mayhem--hardly a crime worth investigating. So, L.A. Herald reporter Sara Smith, who has helped expand her paper's readership by covering the city's latest demon, enlists Garance to draw Toyer out. Their weapon is the Herald's op-ed page, and they inevitably become targets of Toyer as they wage their war of words with him. In a story that moves between a critical commentary on the uses and abuses of the media and a driving (sometimes melodramatic) suspense narrative, Toyer is sure to bring McKay's prose talents to a broader audience. --Patrick O'Kelley