The Medusa Child (NOTE: See Profile for further information)
Five years have passed since the series of shocking and brutal murders known as 'the Tarot Killings' swept across Daleclay. Yet now, in the "present" of the early 1950s, amidst the scenery of two similarly typical American towns - Regal Falls, and the neighboring Pierton - a potentially deadlier menace has begun to simmer...
Several school-age boys - each with an organ connected to one of the vital senses, removed from the body - have been murdered; a local history professor, along with his cerebral assistant, deduce that waxen symbols purposely discarded at the scenes point towards the practices of an ancient, Mithraic cult.
Simultaneously summoned to offer the Regal Falls police a more unorthodox kind of aid, is the renegade detective known as Troy Porter - himself still struggling against a near-breakdown from the events five years prior. Along with Troy likewise arrives a promising adept of journalism - his junior by several years, albeit perchance kindred in spirit - whom the detective befriends during a night-train to their shared destination.
The un-folding murders seem to actually have their origin in the disappearance of two companions from the local elementary school, fifteen years beforehand: Edward Lansing, whose parents afterwards create the eponymous Mary and John Lansing Foundation - an extended 'Protect-the-Children' project - and Gilbert Maxwell, whose own surviving family have avoided the public, ever since.
Soon, the crime scene in Regal Falls spills over into a multitude of increasingly savage, albeit seemingly random, killings which follow the boundaries of neither age nor sex.
Three additional 'top-tier' detectives are recruited, as vial options dissipate; and Bethany Chaiken - the precocious, thirteen-year-old cousin of the professor's assistant - now unyieldingly joins Troy in efforts that grow less sanctioned, and more forlorn, by the hour.
How to rencounter a vier, who has attained near-omnipotence over the human condition itself?
