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Ballantine
June 2004
Featuring: Francis Petrel
448 pages
ISBN: 0345464818
Hardcover
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Suspense
It’s been twenty years since Western State Hospital was
closed down and the last of its inmates reintegrated into
society. Francis Petrel was barely out of his teens when
his family committed him to the asylum, after his erratic
behavior culminated in a terrifying outburst. Now middle-
aged, he leads an aimless, solitary life housed in a cheap
apartment, periodically tended to by his sisters, and
perpetually medicated to quiet the chorus of voices in his
head. But a reunion on the grounds of the shuttered
institution stirs something deep in Francis’s troubled
mind: dark memories he thought he had laid to rest, about
the grisly events that led to Western State Hospital’s
demise. It begins in 1979, when twenty-one-year-old Petrel descends
into the state-run purgatory of an overcrowded,
understaffed Massachusetts mental hospital. Surrounded by
inmates roaming the halls like drugged zombies and raving
behind locked doors, well-meaning orderlies, jaded nurses,
and patronizing doctors, Francis finds friendship with a
motley assortment of fellow patients: a would-be Napoleon,
a wise ex-firefighter, and a man obsessed with battling
imagined devils. But there’s nothing imaginary about the
young nurse found sexually assaulted and brutally murdered
late one night after lights-out. The police suspect an inmate, while patients whisper about
visions of a white-shrouded “angel.” But the striking and
mysterious prosecuting attorney who arrives to investigate
has her own chilling theory—about the grim,
telltale “signature” left on the victim’s body, a string of
unsolved sex killings, and a very real devil who, by chance
or design, has come to turn a madhouse into a
slaughterhouse. Now, with the past creeping back to haunt his thoughts, and
nothing but a pencil and the bare walls of his bleak
apartment, Francis surrenders to the overwhelming need to
tell the story of those nightmarish days. But because the
crime was never solved, it’s a story doomed to remain
unfinished. Until, like Francis’s long-buried
recollections, the killer resurfaces . . . with a vengeance.
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