EricCWelch

Dobyns is better known, perhaps, for his wonderful and hilarious “Saratoga” mystery series featuring private eye Charlie Bradshaw. This is more serious in its implications and genre. A promiscuous woman is murdered, mother of Aaron McNeal, a troubled youth, who is involved with the IIR, Investigations Into the Right, a reading group formed by a new professor at Aurelius College, in the small town of Aurelius. The professor immediately alienates himself from the community by driving a red Citroen and teaching a form of modern Marxism. His greater sin is getting the students in the IIR to begin to question authority and the local power structure. When three girls disappear one at a time, suspicion falls on the members of the IIR. When the girls are discovered, in an attic shrine, tied to chairs, each with her left hand cut off, the community erupts into spasms of fear that becomes an epidemic sweeping through the small town where everyone knows everyone else and everyone else’s business. Soon the support group that had been formed to help the families of the missing girls becomes a vigilante patrol that turns the town into a state of paranoid panic. Everyone becomes a mon ster, rumors feed the frenzy, and anyone who had anything to do with the girls becomes part of the nightmare. It’s a great story with a worthy lesson and the solution to the puzzle is fitting.