In the Lake of the Moon

The first photograph arrived at Stuart Haydon's house on Monday, in an unmarked manila envelope. It was a black-and-white photograph of an oil painting, the painting, the portrait of a young man. Something about him was disturbingly familiar. It was not until Tuesday, when the next envelope arrived, that Haydon recognized—this time from a photograph taken fifty years earlier—the youthful features of his own father. Wednesday and Thursday brought two more envelopes, and startling photographs of an exotically beautiful young woman. Haydon knew that Friday's photograph would be the most explicit of the serries, but he was unprepared for what he saw. It "hit him like a physical blow to his stomach, and he almost gasped, a convulsive wave of nausea rising from deep within him . . .." It was a photograph of Haydon himself, taken only two days before, marked with a felt-tip pen to show a bullet's trajectory to Haydon's head and an explosion. Thus begins the 4th Stuart Haydon which hurls the Houston Homicide Detective into the secret world of his deceased father's tumultuous and romantic past. The novel alternates between Haydon, cooly hunting the man who stalks him, and the psychopathic stalker, deranged by the secrets of a past of which Haydon is unaware; and between the fast-growing boomtown Houston of the 1980's and the subtropical beauty of Mexico City. This time the crimes Haydon is compelled to confront and unravel are intricately intertwined with is own life. The past intrudes upon the present, and Haydon relearns an old lesson: that no individual can truly know or understand the heart and mind of another. The individual is inexplicable.