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September 2 - November 22, 2008
 The
bullet has been lodged next to Alex McKnight’s heart for fourteen years
now, the police officer who was his partner is fourteen years dead, and
the borderline psycho named Rose, who shot them both, has been shut up
in the state penitentiary since he was caught a year later. So how is it
that in a small town named Paradise, on the shore of Lake Superior on
Michigan’s Northern Peninsula, the man named Rose seems to be stalking
Alex McKnight? There is no doubt that Rose is still in prison – he has
neither seen nor spoken to anyone on the “outside” in all these years.
But McKnight, returning to his cabin in the woods late one night, finds
a rose – the killer’s calling card – in the snow at his doorstep. He’d
been called out earlier by Edwin Fulton, a wealthy acquaintance and a
compulsive gambler, who unilaterally thinks of McKnight as his “best
friend.” Fulton had gone to a local motel to pay off a bookmaker and
found the man murdered with his throat cut. In his panic, he called
ex-cop McKnight to extricate him. The bookmaker’s murder is only the
first of what becomes a series of killings, and Fulton’s domineering and
semihysterical mother engages McKnight, now a private detective, to
insure her son’s safety. McKnight accepts the job reluctantly, knowing
he will suffer the recriminations of Fulton’s beautiful, dissatisfied
wife, with whom he had a brief liaison. And all the while, there are the
constant reminders that, impossible as it seems, somewhere nearby is
Rose – his namesake flower at McKnight’s door, his ghostly phone calls,
his insane letters that remind the ex-cop of things done and words said
that only McKnight and the killer could know. It’s a double mystery that
plagues Alex McKnight – how could Rose be in Paradise, and what is he
planning to do to Alex? |
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