"Michael Marshall - The Straw Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marshall Michael)

Synopsis:
In Montana, a man attends the funeral of his parents, ostensibly killed in a car crash. In Los
Angeles, a fifteen-year-old girl is abducted by a man assumed dead. These events are
linked by the fact that in both there is something missing. As there is in so much of the
world, for so much of the time. What's missing is a secret, something which strikes at the
heart of what it is to be human. What it is that makes us this way.
"Sarah tries to struggle, but the man holds her. The scream never makes it out of her
throatтАж Sarah is the fifth girl to be abducted by this maniac. Her long hair will be hacked
off and she will be tortured. She has about a week to liveтАж Former LA homicide detective
John Zandt has an inside track on the perpetrator тАФ his own daughter was one of his
victims. But the key to Sarah's whereabouts lies with Ward Hopkins, a man with a past so
secret not even he knows about it. As he investigates his past. Ward finds himself drawn
into the sinister world of the Straw Men тАФ and into the desperate race to find Sarah,
before her time runs outтАж"


"Brilliantly written and scary as hell." Stephen King.


Michael Marshall is a novelist and screenwriter. He has already established a successful
writing career under the name Michael Marshall Smith. His groundbreaking first novel,
Only Forward, won the Philip K. Dick and August Derleth awards; its critically-acclaimed
successors. Spares and One of Us, have both been optioned for film. He lives in North
London.


MICHAEL MARSHALL
THE STRAW MEN
The first book in the Straw Men series

Version 1.0
Copyright ┬й 2002 by Michael Marshall Smith
For Jane Johnson
We are too late for gods and too early for Being. Being's a poem, Just begun, is man. Martin Heidegger
Language, Truth, Thought Translated by Albert Hofstadter

Palmerston, Pennsylvania
Palmerston is not a big town, nor one that can convincingly be said to be at the top of its game. It's just
there, like a mark on the sidewalk. Like all towns, it has a past and once had a future, but in this case that
future turned out to involve little but getting dustier and more sedate, nudged ever further from the through
lines of history: a stiff old faucet at the end of an increasingly rusty pipe, that someday is going to leak so
badly that no water makes it to the end at all.
The town sits on the Allegheny River, in the shade of muscular hills, and has more trees than you
could shake a stick at unless you had a lot of time and were unusually demented. The railroad used to
pass close by, just the other side of the river, but in the mid 70s the station was closed and most of the
track lifted up. Little remains of it now apart from the memory and a half-hearted museum, which not
even the schoolkids visit much any more. Every now and then a few tourists will wander in, peer with
bemused indifference at grim photographs of the long-dead, and then elect to get back in the car and
make time. Though it's been thirty years, long-term residents (and in Palmerston, they're all long-term,
and vaguely proud of it) still feel the absence of the railroad, like an amputated limb that itches from time