THE DEMONOLOGIST

The desperate search for his missing daughter will take a father to hell and back...

Professor David Ullman is among the world's leading authorities on demonic literature. Not that he's a believer. He sees what he teaches as a branch of the imagination and nothing more. So when offered a luxury trip to Venice to consult on a 'phenomenon', he accepts, taking his 11-year-old daughter Tess with him.

Amidst the decadent splendour of the city, David makes his way to the address he's been asked to visit. What he witnesses in the tiny attic room shakes him to the core: a man restrained in a chair, clearly insane. But what David hears the man say is worse. The voice of his father, dead for 30 years, repeating the last words he ever spoke to his son. Words that have left scars - and a mystery - behind.

Terrified, David is determined to leave with Tess as quickly as possible. But he can't shake the feeling that something is following him. And then, before his eyes on the roof of their hotel, Tess disappears. But before she falls into the Grand Canal's waters, she utters a plea: Find me.

At once frightening and deeply moving, Andrew Pyper's page-turning thriller explores the lengths a father will go to find his daughter, and the darkness he is prepared to confront along the way.

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, March 2013: This supernatural thriller rises above its by-the-numbers plot to deliver a mix of creepy mood and engaging musings on good and evil. It’s still a light read despite author Andrew Pyper’s literary pretensions. The movie rights have been optioned, and the staging of some of the narrative seemed based more for big-screen bang than because it made sense. The story is told by David Ullman, a renowned Miltonian scholar whose knowledge of Paradise Lost draws him into a mystery in Venice that ultimately puts him in peril. Ullman has to fight both his internal demons and possibly some very real ones to save himself, his daughter, and maybe the whole world. Original? No. But The Demonologist still provides a bit of page-turning fun with some truly scary moments that had me shivering during a late-night read. --Aaron Knopf