S.(haron) K. EPPERSON

S. K. Epperson is the author of Borderland, Nightmare, The Moons of Summer, and most recently The Neighborhood, all published by Donald L. Fine Books. The author makes her home in Witchita, Kansas.

As soon as Edie Jackson's baby is born, the population of Dumford, Kansas, will reach 1,000. But the peacefulness of the small town is shrattered when local garbage collector Cal Horn meets a sudden, voilent death, and mutilated bodies of pregnant animals start turning up. Someone in Dumford has a grisly obcession with murder, and Edie's brother Ben Portlock, a young, good-guy cop, is trying to try find out who.
But Ben has more on his mind when he learns that his old girlfriend, Lura Taylor, has quietly returned to her troubled family after a term in prison. Ben finds he still loves her, but he can't forget his own pain and confusion over hte crime his saw her committ years ago.
Ben's investigations only bring him closer to home. He sees Lura walking alone after dark, clad in ghostly white. And Lura's cousin Michelle develops an intense, almost desperate rivalry with Lura for Ben's attentions. The police chief wants to call Cal's death a suicide, but Ben knows it holds the key to the other strange killings-and undercovering the truth leads him to terrifying secrets some people in Dumford will do anything to protect.

Witchia, Kansas: a small city with big-city problems. A city where a serial killer is at large, brutalizing and killing young women. A city where three people-a cop, and heiress, and a drifter-are haunted but cruelity-tinged past that threaten to erupt into present volience.
Simon Brith is the cop. The talk around the station is that he's a gifted homicide investigator who's too intense-and who has a bad attitude toward women. The disfiguring scar at his lip signifies the darksome event of his childhood he hides within him-and which gives him an uncanny ability to read the minds of the killers he stalks.
Terra Donlevy is the heiress. She lives on the secluded farm outside of town, where she harbors the anger instilled in her by the terrible man who used her, as a teen, to satisfy his twisted desires. She is determined, even at the price of becoming a recluse, never to let a man lay a hand on her again.
As Simon and Terra discover each other's pain, and try to overcome their own, their lives are overshadows by the attractive drifter called Brother Lowdown by the indigents who gather to hear his impromtu homilies. But he is more an angel of death than of mercy, prowling the ctreets in a deranged quest for justice, seeking his mother, who mutilated and abandoned him as a child. In his desperate search he exacts his deadly penalty on any woman who excites in him has mother's fearful memory. When he catches sight of Terra Donlevy, his destructive wants reach fever pitch, bringing these three troubled people together in a way which nothing in their unquiet experience has prepared them for.

Buried in Kansas's remote Flint Hills, a clinic for women suffering multiple personality disorders harbored a malevolent secret. One by one the patients turned up hideously mutilated, victims of their own alternate personas or an evil incarnate. As death followed death, the living became trapped in an ever-tightening web of dark desires and monstrous atrocities. And the only person who could stop the killing would let the madness grow until no one could escape the

Abra Ahrens's new neighborhood looked like quint-essential small-town America-a quiet little place with picket fences and friendly folks. But it didn't take her long to notice that beneath the Noram Rockwell exterior a hideous darkness was festering. There was something just a little...odd going on. And someone in town was decidedly unfriendly.

After all, someone had to be responsible for the horrible things that happened to young Cyndi Melo, and that someone wasn't about to stop with just her. Clearly Abra's pleasent community wasn't what seemed, but she couldn't know just how grotesque it really was. And the more she found out, the more she wanted to hide her welcome mat.

So come on over and look around the neighborhood, but be warned-you may never look at your own neighhood the same way again!