Where Serpents Lie - Hardcover

Parker, T. Jefferson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786862874 ISBN 13: 9780786862870

Publisher: Hyperion, 1998

Synopsis

In his newest novel, the bestselling author of "The Triggerman's Dance" masterfully reinvents the classic loner cop: a man with a dark and violent past whose redemption can come only through saving others. Terry Naughton, head of Orange County's new Crimes Against Youth Division, has his work cut out for him when he faces The Horridus--a madman who kidnaps children, then releases them unharmed but dressed in period clothing with a piece of snakeskin as a memento 12-city author tour. TV ads (Psychological Suspense) .

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Reviews

Another intelligently written, well-researched genre clone from Parker (The Triggerman's Dance, 1996, etc.), whose skill at mimicking (and, at times, improving on) B-moviestyle formula fiction can be marvelous, when it isn't so annoyingly unoriginal. Terry Naughton is a manic, divorced police detective, head of Orange County's newly created Crimes Against Youth Division. An almost-but-not-quite-recovered drunk, Naughton is haunted by the death of his young son, a death he feels responsible for. In another part of sunny southern California, Michael Hypok, a blandly cordial video-camera operator for a dating service, is also a perversely obsessive child pornographer who's lately taken to climbing through bedroom windows and snatching young girls, photographing them for his own purposes, then returning them unharmed--except psychologically. Parker gives each of these familiar types a wicked spin: Naughton, who's having an affair with TV news journalist Donna Mason, is looking for a way out of his current live-in relationship with the ex-wife of his loud and boorish superior, Lieutenant Ishmael Jordan; and Hypok (``The Horridus''), who dreams of becoming reborn as a reptile, keeps a den of deadly pet snakes that would just love to devour one of his human captives. Meanwhile, the police procedures are impeccable, the writing blessedly lucid, offering fun facts about snakes, computerized image enhancement, and the righteous sleaze and suburban complacency that make Orange County a Day-Glo crucible of vice and good intentions. Parker's plotting, however, is blatantly derivative--in a Silence of the Lambs vein. There are also gross-outs for people who hate snakes, and a regrettably dumb climax (one of three) in which Hypok scampers about in a snakeskin body suit. A predictable stew whose superior ingredients taste like last week's leftovers. ($350,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In his sixth thriller (after The Triggerman's Dance, Hyperion, 1996), Parker returns to Orange County, California, where cop Terry Naughton, head of Crimes Against Youth, a division he helped create, is fiercely trying to track down a creepy pedophile who calls himself Horridus (as in Crotalus horridus, or timber rattlesnake) before he kills one of the young girls that he has kidnapped. It seems that besides child pornography and rape, Horridus is also into snakes?really big, hungry snakes?and there's evidence that he has used these "pets" to dispose of victims in the past. But Naughton's case is thrown into limbo when he's arrested for pedophilia after damning photographs show up in a police raid. Was he set up, or are the photos genuine, as the FBI claims they are? This taut police procedural mixes high suspense with believable characters; it's a real page-turner. Recommended for all fiction collections.?Rebecca House Stankowski, Purdue Univ. Calumet Lib., Hammond, Ind.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786862874
• ISBN 13: 9780786862870
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352