Thunder Moon is a damned fine book! Five-time Shamus Award nominee and Derringer and Thriller Award winner Richard Helms twists the plot like a strand of DNA without ever cheating the reader out of excitement or emotional depth. One of my favorite novels of the year!"-Reed Farrel Colemen, three-time Shamus Award-winning author of What You BreakTempers and violence always seem to flare during the scorching summer months in rural Prosperity, North Carolina. Within the span of several weeks, police chief Judd Wheeler will deal with a police standoff, multiple murders, a motorcycle gang war, a paroled sex offender, con games perpetrated by an itinerant tent preacher, and an incursion of evil more malevolent than tiny Bliss County has ever seen!Steve Samples, a promising draft pick for the NFL Pooler Pythons football team, is found naked and brutally hacked to death with a meat cleaver. In Samples' pants pockets upstairs are bloodstained twenty-dollar bills, and Wheeler can't explain how they got there. Wheeler discovers that Samples was with a woman the night before he died, and the woman has a dangerous boyfriend who becomes Wheeler's prime suspect. The blood on the money links the boyfriend to two murders, but Wheeler can't find him anywhere. Wheeler realizes he is looking at a series of seemingly unrelated crimes unified by a single vengeful entity that has descended on Prosperity like a suffocating black cloud. Bodies begin to pile like winter cordwood, and the only thing standing between Prosperity and a descent into chaos is the steady-eyed, broad-shouldered figure of Chief Judd Wheeler. In the tiny North Carolina farm town called Prosperity, it seems nothing comes to a good end in the shadow of the Thunder Moon!