A series of murders and mysterious hate crimes rocks a quiet California town, leading a cunning detective into the crosshairs of a network of white supremacists in this can't-put-it-down thriller.
Rancho Santa Elena in 1987 is the ideal Southern California town-that is, until a series of strange crimes threaten to destroy its social fabric. The body of a dog is left outside a Vietnamese grocery store. An encampment of Mexican strawberry pickers is savagely attacked with mysterious weapons. A wealthy real estate developer is found dead in the pool of his beachside house. When rat poison and red threads are found at these crime scenes, detective Benjamin Wade and his girlfriend, forensic expert Natasha Betencourt, begin to wonder if these brutal crimes are connected.
Soon Ben suspects that a gang of young locals, part of a vicious underbelly in town, might be the perpetrators of these crimes. As Ben closes in on identifying the gang's latest recruit, he discovers evidence that links the gang to a much wider terror network, one which uses the newly-developed internet to lure young men to their hateful ideology and to plan attacks. And, while he digs deeper into the investigation, Ben must confront his own realizations about himself, and his membership in a community where corruption and hate are wielded as weapons against his fellow citizens. Alan Drew is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Gardens of Water and Shadow Man. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. An associate professor of English at Villanova University, where he directs the creative writing program, he lives near Philadelphia with his wife and two children.
