Cul-de-Sac: A Novel [Hardcover]

Great villains can make a mystery, and David Martin's latest has not one but two wonderful heavies--a grinning lunatic named Donald Growler, guilty of everything but the murder that got him sent to prison, and McCleany, the cold-blooded cop who framed him. Squeezed between these two evils are Paul, the gentle, religious young man who helped Growler get paroled, Paul's wife, and her former lover--a tough ex-cop named Teddy Camel who can look at bad guys and make them confess. Camel will need all his smarts to get over the hump of a vengeful Growler and an even more vicious McCleany. Martin's previous Camel caravan, Lie to Me, is available in paperback.

At the beginning of Martin's stylish but unbearably brutal new thriller, Donald Growler puts a severed human head into a washing machine, pours in some shampoo after it, notes it's called Head & Shoulders, thinks "Or in this case just Head," then muses: "It wasn't that difficult being a homicidal maniac." Not exactly a thigh-slapper, but that's about as light as the book gets. The ferocious Growler was once wrongfully accused of murder; after his release from a crippling jail sentence, he goes around systematically slaughtering, in lubriciously painful detail, the people he believes set him up. Since one of them is perky heroine Annie Milton, with whom ex-cop Teddy Camel once had an affair, Camel finds himself drawn into the hunt for Growler?which in this case consists mostly of trying to stay alive and keep Annie ditto. With the aid of a couple of really crooked cops, a hideous old house that doubles as a torture chamber and sundry cruelties, including a victim burned alive, the nailing of someone's foot to the floor, several beheadings, a sanguinary garroting and an ingeniously contrived electrocution, Martin eventually thins out his cast. The fact that he writes swiftly and with some wit doesn't really compensate for the strain on the reader. This and the recent Bone Collector (Forecasts, Dec. 16) seem to be part of a campaign to prove that writers can reach new depths in depicting violence if they put their minds to it.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Martin has been praised for his willingness to experiment with character and tone. Here, retired police detective Teddy Camel, introduced in Lie to Me (LJ 6/1/90), agrees to help a former lover make sense of her husband's involvement with an ex-con bent on revenge for a wrongful-murder sentence. A mysterious mansion, millions in gold, photos of possible blackmail, and strong hints of a police cover-up of an earlier murder complicate Camel's investigation. By the time ten bodies amass, many minus their heads, readers have been immersed in blood, lies, and the bizarre inner workings of more than one twisted mind. This noir tale leaves no one unscathed. Even Camel, the "human lie detector," is forced to lie. Not for the squeamish, this will nevertheless please Martin's fans. For most fiction/suspense collections.?Roland C. Person, Morris Lib., Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cul-de-Sac is a decaying old mansion right out of a gothic horror tale. Its latest owners, Paul and Annie Milton, are soon to become its latest victims. Seven years earlier, a terrible murder took place at Cul-de-Sac. Now the accused killer, Donald Growler, has been released from prison. Growler, who swears he was framed, has spent the last seven years plotting his revenge. Returning to Cul-de-Sac, Growler makes Paul his first victim in a terrifying game of sexual torture. When Annie begins to suspect what Growler has in mind for the future, she turns to Detective Teddy Camel, a man she's loved since she was 10. Annie knows Teddy will save her from the demented Growler, but Teddy does more than that--he uncovers the disturbing truth about the tragic case. Martin's story may be weak on the credibility scale, but readers won't care. They'll be riveted to their seats by the expertly executed killer-stalks-victim scenes and chilled to the bone by the psychotic Growler. The final perfect touches: whimsical doses of black humor and an unexpectedly satisfying ending. A consummate if gruesome thriller for all but the most conservative collections. Emily Melton

Another gruesome and rudely funny thriller from the author of Lie to Me (1990), Bring Me Children (1992), and other vivid exercises in contemporary Grand Guignol. In vigorous parallel scenes that feature literally dozens of teasing cliff-hangers, Martin leads us in and out of the title domicile, a ``decaying former hotel-hospital-asylum . . . [a] sixty-room monstrosity in the Virginia exurbs of Washington, D.C.'' Its new owner and renovator, Paul Milton, who also volunteers aid to prisoners undergoing rehabilitation, unhappily meets up with ex- convict Donald Growler, the innocent man who was framed for the murder of a teenaged girl committed several years earlier at Cul- de-Sac--and whose brutalization in prison has converted him into a vengeful psychopath. That implausibility aside, the novel rocks along agreeably, piling up bodies (there are ten killings, none at all genteel), and deftly introducing characters involved in both the story's background and in its present action. Paul's wife Annie seeks the aid of her onetime lover, ex-cop Teddy Camel (``the Human Lie Detector,'' and a recurring Martin character), and he soon sniffs out evidence of a conspiracy that points to the murdered girl's family and to the police who investigated her death, as well as suggesting the existence of a mysterious ``elephant'' for which many people are more than willing to slaughter many other people. Meanwhile, Growler, having sworn to gain revenge on those who gave false testimony at his trial, blithely indulges his penchant for sexual humiliation, torture, garroting, and decapitation. He's a credible enough monster, the feisty Annie (who's not above violence herself, when it's called for) is an effective endangered heroine, and Teddy Camel has just the right Bogartian mixture of cynical ennui and soured romanticism. If only these people weren't wiping blood off themselves and one another every few pages. . . . Expert technique pretty much wasted on sadistic excess. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

suspenseful, frightening, and gripping thriller about a family secret and a wrongly accused murderer from the author of Lie to Me. Here, David Martin brings back his most engaging hero: retired Detective Teddy Camel--a.k.a. "The Human Lie Detector"--on his last case.

Praise for CUL-DE-SAC:

"Chilling." --TULSA WORLD

"Gruesome." --BOOKLIST (starred review)

"Not for the squeamish." --LIBRARY JOURNAL --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Seven long years. David Growler did the brutal jail time for a crime he didn't even commit. He wasn't a killer--not when he entered prison, anyway. But that place can do things to man, things you can't even utter in the dark of night.

Once the scene of a grisly murder, Paul and Annie Milton bought the dilapidated mansion known as Cul-de-Sac to restore it. But strange things are happening at the old house: Paul and Annie are being stalked, and Paul is slowly losing his mind--yet he refuses to leave. Ex-cop Teddy Camel begins to investigate the mystery surrounding Cul-de-Sac, starting with the violent killing that took place there seven years before. And what he and Annie uncover--about a high-level cover-up, a family with dark and expensive secrets, and a furlowed prisoner bent on exacting his own brand of horrific justice--will chill them to the core...and could very well kill them all.

Shocking you at every turn, while keeping you spellbound with a brilliant plot that unfolds to a stunning conclusion, David Martin takes the helm as one of today's masters of page-turning suspense. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

David Martin's previous novels include THE CRYING HEART, TATTOO, TETHERED, THE BEGINNING OF SORROWS, TAP, TAP, and BRING ME CHILDREN. He first introduced the hero of CUL-DE-SAC, Detective Teddy Camel, in his international bestseller LIE TO ME. He and his wife, Arabel, operate a working farm in West Virginia. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.