Free Perfect Little Town by Blake Crouch

lake, its wind-rippled surface reflecting the pier lights. The blue light at the end of Walter’s pier shone out across the water from a distant inlet. His “Gatsby light,” we called it. My eyes scanned the grass and the edge of the trees, but it was far too dark to see anything in the woods.
    “I’m not in the house,” he said. “Sit down.”
    I felt something well up inside of me-anger at the fear, rage at this injustice.
    “Change of plan,” I said. “I’m going to hang up, dial nine one one, and take my chances. You can go-”
    “If you aren’t motivated by self-preservation, there’s an old woman named Jeanette I could-”
    “I’ll kill you.”
    “Sixty-five, lives alone, I think she’d love the company. What do you think? Do I have to visit your mother to show you I’m serious? What is there to consider? Tell me you’ll be on that plane, Andrew. Tell me so I don’t have to visit your mother tonight.”
    “I’ll be on that plane.”
    The phone clicked, and he was gone.

LOCKED DOORS
    Published July 2005 by Thomas Dunne Books

    DESCRIPTION: Seven years ago, suspense novelist Andrew Thomas’s life was shattered when he was framed for a series of murders. The killer’s victims were unearthed on Andrew’s lakefront property, and since he was wanted by the FBI, Andrew had no choice but to flee and to create a new identity.  Andrew does just that in a cabin tucked away in the remote wilderness near Haines Junction, Yukon. His only link to society is by e-mail, through which he learns that all the people he ever loved are being stalked and murdered. Culminating in the spooky and secluded Outer Banks of North Carolina, the paths of Andrew Thomas, a psychotic named Luther Kite, and a young female detective collide.  Locked Doors is a novel of blistering suspense that will scare you to death.

    Crouch quite simply is a marvel. Locked Doors is as good as anything I’ve read all year, a stay-up-all-night thriller that will have you chewing your fingers down to the nub even as you’re reading its last paragraph. Highest possible recommendation.
BOOKREPORTER

    Palpable suspense. Non-stop action. Relentless and riveting. Blake Crouch is the most exciting new thriller writer I’ve read in years.
DAVID MORRELL

    Excerpt from Locked Doors…

    The headline on the Arts and Leisure page read: Publisher to Reissue Five Thrillers by Alleged Murderer Andrew Z. Thomas.
    All it took was seeing his name.
    Karen Prescott dropped The New York Times and walked over to the window.
    Morning light streamed across the clutter of her cramped office--query letters and sample chapters stacked in two piles on the floor beside the desk, a box of galleys shoved under the credenza. She peered out the window and saw the fog dissolving, the microscopic crawl of traffic now materializing on Broadway through the cloud below.
    Leaning against a bookcase that housed many of the hardcovers she’d guided to publication, Karen shivered. The mention of Andrew’s name always unglued her.
    For two years she’d been romantically involved with the suspense novelist and had even lived with him during the writing of Blue Murder at the same lake house in North Carolina where many of his victims were found.
    She considered it a latent character defect that she’d failed to notice anything sinister in Andy beyond a slight reclusive tendency.
    My God, I almost married him.
    She pictured Andy reading to the crowd in that Boston bookshop the first time they met. In a bathrobe writing in his office as she brought him fresh coffee (French roast, of course). Andy making love to her in a flimsy rowboat in the middle of Lake Norman.
    She thought of his dead mother.
    The exhumed bodies from his lakefront property.
    His face on the FBI website.
    They’d used his most recent jacket photo, a black-and-white of Andy in a sports jacket sitting broodingly at the end of his pier.
    During the last few years she’d stopped thinking of him as Andy. He was