Sinopsis

The Ghoul - The 2nd SPECIAL X Thriller.

Specter-like and sinewy, dressed in a gray cape and top hat, with a bone-white face and madman's eyes, the Ghoul crawls from the London sewers to kill-bloodily, perversely, inexplicably. 

In a London pub, Jack Ohm watches the Saturday-night crowd of gay patrons enter a steam-bath. Once his grisly work is done, he sends flowers to Scotland Yard. 

Detective Chief Superintendent Hilary Rand is already investigating seven murders by a psychotic butcher the press has dubbed the Vampire Killer when these two new crimes land on her desk. Her career is already on the line, and if she doesn't get results soon, it will be over. 

In Vancouver, the horror-rock group Ghoul cavort onstage, their act a bizarre and violent front. But for what? Drugs? Snuff films? Dirty money? Contract killings? Inspector Zinc Chandler of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police thinks he knows and is prepared to throw away the rule book to find out. 

Is there a connection between London's orgy of killing and Vancouver's underworld sleaze? The answer could lie in the dark obsessions and twisted fantasies of an old Rhode Island family whose tainted past will not lie quiet in its grave. 

Ghoul is a powerful, bloody thriller, as complex and gripping as Michael Slade's sensational first novel, Headhunter. It is the horror lover's worst nightmare come true. 

Review

'Michael Slade's novels make your blood run cold... They are really exciting and take the reader deeper into the mental world of psychopaths than they would like.' - Diana Gabaldon

'Slade knows how to tell a story convincingly. A warning: his novels are not for the faint-hearted...' - Robert McCammon

'Slade takes the hard-hitting thriller into icy new territory.' - Anne Perry

From Publishers Weekly

Slade is a pen name for Jay Clarke, John Banks and Lee Clarke, the trio who previously produced Headhunter and now this excessively nasty horror story. The pages are crammed with nauseating details and incidents of maiming, murders, incest and other crimes committed in Canada, England and the U.S. While not sexually occupied with different women, Zinc Chandler of the RCMP investigates the putative musicians in the rock group, Ghoul, Rika Hyde and her brother Saxon Hyde (stage names, Erika Zann and Axel Crypt). In London, Scotland Yard's Hilary Rand faces demotion when she fails to stop a mad bomber and a bloodthirsty fiend. Chandler, meanwhile, learns that one of the Hydes' two half-sisters was killed, the body dissolved in an acid bath. He meets and falls in love with the other sister, Deborah, who seems the only sane member of the scandalous family. Interrupted continually by psychological analyses and quantities of needless details about paper-thin characters, the narrative becomes merely boring. The trio are no match for H. P. Lovecraft or other authors to whom they refer, apparently to validate the gory details of this mystery.