Dark Specter

In this majestically unnerving novel, Michael Dibdin, the creator of the acclaimed Aurelio Zen mysteries, explores themes that might have been ripped out of today's headlines, as he charts America's dual epidemic of religious cultism and random violence.The murders take place in distant cities and with no apparent motive. All that connects them is their cold-blooded efficiency. But a dogged Seattle detective and a horribly bereaved survivor are about to come face-to-face with their perpetrator—a man named Los, a self-styled prophet who has the power to make his followers travel thousands of miles to kill for him. Out of mayhem and revelation, the minutiae of police work and the explosive contents of a psychotic mind, Michael Dibdin orchestrates a tour de force of dread. This should be read with the lights on and the doors firmly bolted.

With an extraordinarily acute take on the extremist mind, the award-winning author of Ratking gives readers an electrifying story of interconnected lives, all of which spin in a desperate orbit around a man known to his followers as the "Eternal Prophet."

In this majestically unnerving novel, Michael Dibdin, the creator of the acclaimed Aurelio Zen mysteries, explores themes that might have been ripped out of today's headlines, as he charts America's dual epidemic of religious cultism and random violence.

The murders take place in distant cities and with no apparent motive. All that connects them is their cold-blooded efficiency. But a dogged Seattle detective and a horribly bereaved survivor are about to come face-to-face with their perpetrator—a man named Los, a self-styled prophet who has the power to make his followers travel thousands of miles to kill for him. Out of mayhem and revelation, the minutiae of police work and the explosive contents of a psychotic mind, Michael Dibdin orchestrates a tour de force of dread. This should be read with the lights on and the doors firmly bolted.

Publishers Weekly

Poets and psychopathology converge in another crime thriller as Dibdin, known best for his Aurelio Zen procedurals set in Italy, writes about a religious cult led by a Blake-obsessed fanatic. The evil in this tale, however, which is at once more organized and more random than that in Michael Connelly's Poe-prompted The Poet, also ranges across the U.S. Dibdin meticulously establishes the skeleton of his intricate story, introducing readers first to a boy who by chance survives the shooting murder of everyone else in his Seattle household. More murders-near Chicago, in Kansas City, in Atlanta-are related in chapters that alternate with those narrated by Phil, a college English teacher in Minneapolis, who is married and the father of a little boy. Phil runs into Sam, a Vietnam vet with whom he shared a house in their druggie student years. Later, Phil's son disappears and is presumed dead; his wife commits suicide and Phil, unmoored, visits Sam on an island off the Washington coast. There the threads of this plot, which Dibdin has so masterfully laid out, are drawn together in a diabolical pattern that is loosely pinned on the writings of Blake and ends, as it began, in a house whose occupants, bound and gagged, are threatened with execution. Dibdin's fans may decry his having exchanged elegant, dark Venice for this glossy, plastic-colored U.S. setting, but his deft plotting and reliable characterization are fully present in this top-notch thriller. 50,000 first printing; author tour.

Michael Dibdin was born in England and raised in Northern Ireland. He attended Sussex University and the University of Alberta in Canada. He spent five years in Perugia, Italy, where he taught English at the local university. He went on to live in Oxford, England and Seattle, Washington. He was the author of eighteen novels, eleven of them in the popular Aurelio Zen series, including Ratking, which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, and Cabal, which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He died in 2007.