Nightwatcher

From Barnes & Noble

When this novel appeared a few years ago in hardcover, I said in a review: "Wilson may flat out be the best plotter of my generation. Nightwatcher is dark, scary, and truly menacing. Wilson takes as his premise three inmates escaping a state hospital for the criminally insane." If you liked Halloween or Scream, you'll love Nightwatcher.

—Ed Gorman

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Wilson's debut--a neat mix of mystery, police procedural and terror--marks him as someone to watch. On the night three men escape from a Mississippi insane asylum, a young nurse is raped and murdered just outside the grounds. Her lawyer father, Brandon Richards, arrives at dawn, mourning Judith and bent on revenge. It soon becomes clear that the escapees are not responsible, mainly because their blood types do not match that found on the scene. But the blood is the type of Judith's estranged bisexual husband, whose boyfriend may supply an alibi. Richards teams up with Sheriff Tidmore and hires private eye J. J. Winstead (not known for legal niceties) to track down the killer. Complications proliferate: a psychopathic mass murderer says he saw the killer from his cell; the boyfriend is slain; Richards is arrested for trying to plant evidence in his son-in-law's home; tales of Judith's risky extramarital affairs cause Richards to doubt his new ``friends'' Tidmore and Winstead; and there are three more killings. The case is tied up neatly, but not before Wilson had led us on a complicated, occasionally harrowing chase. (Dec.)

Library Journal

The vicious murder of a vulnerable nurse outside a state mental hospital brings New Orleans lawyer Brandon Richards to the scene, panting for revenge. High anxi ety and hurried pace shove the plot along, turning Richards into amateur detective, introducing any number of questionable characters, and plying the text with gratu itous standard elements (setup for a fall, mafia father, sudden girlfriend on the scene, etc.). The speed compensates for the rapidly thinning prose, however, so just as interest dies, the book ends. A slick but negligible and trite first novel.