In the Lake of the Moon

SYNOPSIS

“…no individual can truly know or understand the heart and mind of another…”

The first photograph arrived at Stuart Haydon’s house on Monday, in an unmarked manila envelope. It was a black-and-white photograph of an oil painting, the painting, the portrait of a young man. Something about him was disturbingly familiar. It was not until Tuesday, when the next envelope arrived, that Haydon recognized—this time from a photograph taken fifty years earlier—the youthful features of his own father. Wednesday and Thursday brought two more envelopes, and startling photographs of an exotically beautiful young woman.

Haydon knew that Friday’s photograph would be the most explicit of the series, but he was unprepared for what he saw. It “hit him like a physical blow to his stomach, and he almost gasped, a convulsive wave of nausea rising from deep within him . . ..” It was a photograph of Haydon himself, taken only two days before, marked with a felt-tip pen to show a bullet’s trajectory to Haydon’s head and an explosion.

Thus begins the 4^th novel in the Stuart Haydon quintet which hurls the Houston Homicide Detective into the secret world of his deceased father’s tumultuous and romantic past. The novel alternates between Haydon methodically hunting the man who stalks him, and the psychopathic stalker, obsessed by the secrets of a past of which Haydon is unaware; and between the fast-growing boomtown Houston of the 1980’s and the subtropical beauty of Mexico City.

This time the crimes Haydon is compelled to confront and unravel are intricately intertwined with his own life. The past intrudes upon the present, and Haydon relearns an old lesson: that no individual can truly know or understand the heart and mind of another. The individual is inexplicable.

AUTHOR’S COMMENTS

Every novel I write leaves something of itself with me forever. The novel’s mood, it’s scenes, its characters and even its language remain in my head, and sometimes in my heart too. It’s impossible for me to choose one of my books and call it my favorite because, like people, each novel has its own personality and faults and gifts, and each is meaningful to me in a way that only it can be.

But often readers surprise me. They do have favorites, and In the Lake of the Moon has more than its share of admirers. There’s nothing typical about this book. It has a strangeness and beauty all its own, and I’m delighted and gratified that many readers have been captivated by it.

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