From acclaimed, internationally bestselling author Andrew Pyper, a suspenseful page-turner that explores the repercussions of the most dishonest of thefts: stealing another’s story and calling it your own.When Patrick Rush, journalist, single father, and failed novelist, decides to join a creative writing circle, it seems a fertile time for the imagination. Throughout Toronto, a murderer is striking at random, leaving his victims’ bodies mutilated and dismembered, and taunting the police with cryptic notes.
Influenced by the atmosphere of menace and fear, the group begins to read each other their own dark, unsettling tales. One, Angela, tells a mesmerizing story about a childstealer called the Sandman. Patrick, though, ?nds fantasy and reality becoming blurred. Is the maniac at large in fact the Sandman? What does Angela really know? And is he himself being stalked by the killer?
It is only when his son is snatched that Patrick understands what he must do: embark on a horrifying journey into the unknown and track down the elusive ?gure known as the Sandman.
At once a complex and compulsive read, The Killing Circle explores the side effects of an increasingly fame-mad culture, where even the staid realm of literature can fall prey to ravenous ambition and competition.
"Extraordinary . . . Powered by an ingeniously nonlinear narrative and suffused with a tone thick with dread, this is easily Pyper’s most ambitious—and absorbing—work to date.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The Killing Circle is one great read: darkly lyrical and atmospheric, it’s as haunting as it is gripping. Highly recommended.” —Harlan Coben
“Very smart, very scary, very good: once I started I couldn’t stop. Fans of dark and witty suspense will love The Killing Circle.” —Peter Abrahams, author of Oblivion
I write novels for a living, and it's the best (and now only) job I can imagine for myself. My books are usually referred to as thrillers, or "literary thrillers," or mysteries, or suspense, or even sometimes horror - though I see them as merely stories where bad things happen, and where people learn more of themselves through experiencing bad things. If those bad things are also scary and/or thrilling and/or mysterious, all the better.
My most recent novel is The Killing Circle, which is about what happens when a wannabe novelist steals another wannabe's story and the villain from that story is given life in the so-called "real world." It was selected as a Notable Crime Novel of the Year in The New York Times. Then there's The Wildfire Season, about a man who must pass through a forest fire that has encircled a remote town in order to save his ex-girlfriend and the daughter he met for the first time only days earlier. The Trade Mission has been called a "modern Heart of Darkness" and involves a pair of overnight dot-com millionaires (remember them?) brutally confronting non-virtual reality after being pursued in the Brazilian jungle. Finally (or originally) there's Lost Girls, which was a New York Times Notable Book and Globe and Mail Best Book, won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel, and concerns a defence lawyer who believes he's being visited by the ghosts of two girls, the presumed victims of a double murder committed either by his client...or the Lady of Lake, a local myth who waits to pull others down into the lake outside town...
The Killing Circle, The Wildfire Season and Lost Girls are all in active development (as they say) for feature films.
I also have a law degree I've never used, and a B.A. and M.A in English Literature which have proved considerably more handy. I live in Toronto for the most part.
There's more biographical tidbits and tidbits of other sorts too at my website: www.andrewpyper.com
Hope you enjoy the books!
