Author Chris Mooney

Jack looked past Burke's shoulder at the sliding glass door. The killer had cut a square section of glass large enough for him to reach his hand through and unlock the door. The call came in just after twelve, and what he had done with the family took time. He had counted on the bomb wiping out the evidence. But the bomb hadn't gone off and the crime scene was intact.

"Upstairs in that bedroom is a fully constructed crime scene, complete with evidence that the bomb was supposed to erase, and you're standing here telling me to just walk away."

"I want you to think with your head and not with the hard-on you got for this guy," Burke said. "You scraped by last month. This time, you may not be so lucky."

"The fact is that he had plenty of chances to take us out and the entire goddamn town and he didn't. Why? Because he can't. The bomb malfunctioned and right now he's sitting somewhere very pissed off, dreaming up his next move. You and I both know this is going to happen again, and when it does, we won't be having this kind of conversation. We'll either be dead or sifting through rubble and sliding body parts into Ziplock bags with spatulas. And the whole fucking world will be watching."

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Atria US hardcover Oct 2000 ISBN 9780671040598
Pocket Star US mass-market paperback Oct 2001 ISBN 9780671040604
Recorded Books Audio Cassette (unabridged) Oct 2001 ISBN 0788759884

I was taking a rather dull English course in college, one of those requirement courses that you need to check off in order to graduate. I don't remember the name of the course, but I do remember that the instructor had a monotone voice—a natural sedative that put half the class to sleep—and that while he was droning on and about Le Morte de'Arthur (the Death of King Arthur), my imagination started kicking around this idea of a man with disturbing, penetrating black eyes that formed one big black pupil. And he didn't so much look at you as look through you, and he had this ability to, just through his powers of observation, figure out what made you tick. This person was named Malcolm Fletcher, and during my writing classes at the University of New Hampshire, I tried to bring him to life.

Either I wasn't very good at doing my job (partially true), or the writing professors weren't interested in reading a story about a former FBI profiler with a frightening past, instead wanting more short stories about angst-filled, whining characters searching for meaning in their meaningless lives (probably true). So Malcolm Fletcher disappeared for a while I wrote story stories about people becoming bean farmers, or something. I do remember one short story from that time, a story about a prostitute called "Air and Angles." My professor hated it, and while I'm sure there was a measured certain pretentiousness to it, the story did go on to win the yearly fiction contest for the campus magazine.

During my last year of graduate school, Fletcher came back to me one day while I was out drinking with friends, only this time he brought words: "I have such worlds to show you." Yes, I did have a good buzz going, and yes, just about everything you say or thing sounds great when you've had a few. But the words struck a chord, especially when I started playing around with an idea I had: a serial killer known as The Sandman who was not only killing families in a grisly fashion and letting one survive, but leaving bombs, wanting to kill the police. The Sandman had an axe to grind, you see, especially with the FBI—and later, with Jack Casey, another former profiler with a disturbing history that equaled that of Malcolm Fletcher.

Move over, Hannibal Lecter. The Sandman is coming, and he's going to knock you off your perch as the world's creepiest and smartest serial killer. Chris Mooney's nail-biting, scarifying debut thriller features a fully drawn protagonist in former FBI profiler Jack Casey, whose life was shattered when another madman killed his pregnant wife before his eyes. Now Jack's a local cop on a small-town beat in Marblehead, Massachusetts, rebuilding his life with the help of a beautiful woman and a community of caring friends. But when a psychopath who seems to know everything about Jack's past as well as his present starts torturing and killing entire families in the quiet Boston suburb and then trapping his pursuers by blowing them up at the scene, Casey begins to wonder where the man the media dubbed the Sandman is getting his inside information. Is there a conspiracy at the highest levels of federal intelligence to cover up a behavioral experiment gone wrong? What's the connection between an unsolved arson at a Massachusetts home for troubled boys and the Sandman's choice of victims? And where does another ex-profiler fit in? He seems to know as much as the Sandman and offers Jack his help in solving the awful crimes.
The most important question may be whether Anthony Hopkins is available for another leading role as a psychopath. But don't wait for the inevitable big-screen treatment. Grab this bloody, violent, and mesmerizing study of psychological terror and the redemptive power of love before they call the casting director. Just don't read it on a stormy night when you're home alone.
   —Amazon.com

The familiar device of revenge killing is given horrific new twists in this gripping debut, as Mooney propels the reader into breathless suspense. The action kicks off with a literal bang [and] along the way Casey joins forces with the dark and fascinating Malcolm Fletcher, a renegade from the profiling department given to quoting Oscar Wilde, reading Le Morte d'Arthur in French and delivering the odd wisecrack ("I've seen your efforts. A high school freshman trying to unclasp a bra has a more polished approach"). Fascinating, too, is the novel's villain, the self-proclaimed Sandman, whose fiendish use of up-to-the-minute technology, for both surveillance and destruction, lends the novel some of its most distinctive details. Mooney's cinematic eye, unerring ear for vivid dialogue and deft touches of humanity—often interjected in moving counterpoint to the plot's malevolence—combine to turn this novel...into a rousing read.
   —Publishers Weekly

Mooney's novel is a violent, action-filled tale, but it rises above many run-of-the-mill serial-killer thrillers because all the high-blown action always has a personal consequence and because the characters are sufficiently defined to make us care what happens to them. Recommend this one to readers of Thomas Harris and Jeffrey Deaver.
   —Booklist