Winter's End

They have the body of a slaughtered woman. They have a half-naked man standing over her. They have no idea how to make him talk. And so they call in ex-FBI interrogator Alex Rourke to the traumatized Maine town of Winter's End. But as Rourke probes the mind of the enigmatic 'Nicholas', he is forced to re-examine his own past .... Strange things have been happening in Winter's End. The question is why. And if the man in custody does hold the answers to crimes both present and past, then Alex will have to get to them - and quickly. Because it soon becomes clear that what Nicholas has been waiting for from the beginning - is Alex Rourke.

You catch a guy at the scene of a brutal murder with the weapons in his hands – pretty open and shut. But what if you can’t actually prove he did it? What if he won’t even tell you his name? If you don’t know who he is, how can you ever know why he did what he did?

Dealing with all these questions is the job of Alex Rourke, returning to his home town for the first time in seventeen years at the request of the police. As he struggles to unravel the stranger’s reasons for killing, and his reasons for picking the tiny town of Winter’s End, Alex is forced to face the ghosts of his own past and those of his sleepy town before they can overwhelm the present.

In writing Winter’s End, I wanted to create a group of complex yet very human characters in a setting and story with a very definite gothic slant and a genuinely creepy atmosphere, somewhere the lines between perception and reality could be blurred, just a little.

Welcome to Winter’s End. I hope you enjoy your stay.

- John R.