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Murder and ghoulish mayhem are the order of the day in bestseller McCammon's colorful third thriller featuring "problem-solver" Matthew Corbett and his escapades in early 18th-century America. After confronting a criminal mastermind in  (2007), Matthew finds himself a celebrity whose exploits have become sensational fodder for colonial tabloids. This heady attention contributes to a bad lapse of judgment when he and his senior associate, Hudson Greathouse, accidentally allow a brutal murderer, Tyranthus Slaughter, to give them the slip while they transport him to prison in Philadelphia. The rousing narrative details Matthew's dogged pursuit of the indestructible Tyranthus as the killer cuts a bloody swath through the Pennsylvania wilderness. McCammon shows a sure hand balancing scenes of Matthew's quiet contemplation with the cold-blooded carnage that makes his quarry's name so appropriate.<

The sleepy calm of Marble Springs, Florida, is shattered when an unknown Englishman ruthlessly shoots his way out of the courtroom, abducting the lovely Mary Ruthven at gun-point and tearing out of town in a stolen car. Who is he? What is his concern with the girl, with the General's secluded house and with the great oil-rig twelve miles out in the Gulf of Mexico? Who are his three enemies?

Set against a Sub-tropical background, this is a novel of revenge. From the opening of sudden disaster to the final reckoning — on a dusty high road at noon, in a garden by night, in the steel jungle of the oil-rig and on the sea-bed below it — the tension mounts inexorably. Alistair MacLean's story-telling has never been more brilliants or his grip on the reader more cruelly exciting.

Paul Sherman of Interpol's Narcotics Bureau lands at Schiphol Airport. As far as he is aware no one but Jimmy Duclos knows of his arrival in Amsterdam. Duclos is there to meet him-and four men are there to meet Duclos. Sherman has to recognize that the gang of heroin smugglers he was out to smash know his movements as well as he does. Backed by Amsterdam's police, Sherman tries to outwit the genius behind the drug ring, a master-puppeteer who knows how to manipulate the underworld so that his own tracks are obliterated at every step.

The action moves from the back streets of Amsterdam to a barge on the Zuider Zee, from an island whose inhabitants specialize in making costumed puppets, to the crypt of a missionary sect's church. Not until the very last minute is the master-puppeteer revealed — and by then he is in possession of a puppet of such value and beauty that it taxes all Sherman's ingenuity and courage to prevent this-one, too, from swinging on a grisly chain . . .