The Final Days

It started with a letter, in the handwriting of a child - o god help me hes going to hurt me if you dont do what he says. Karen Wiley, recently qualified San Francisco psychologist, thought she understood moral dilemma. A tormented past, a sister lost in childhood to random atrocity, an ugly divorce, a precocious eleven-year-old daughter. he says hes going to hurt me. No-one Karen knows has been kidnapped. If the police are powerless, is it her responsibility? The letters keep coming. Then far, far worse. Because there is a child out there.

It started in an old Mormon mining town, with a history darkly hidden. A fool leaves his young daughters alone in a rotting trailer park. He returns to find one of them gone, the other seeping blood into thin carpet, brains bulging through the hole in her head. he knows where you are now I had to give it to him im so sorry. Ella McCullers, first female Police Chief of Canaan, Utah, believed she knew crises of faith. Abruptly promoted to lead investigator in the state's most high-profile kidnapping case, her only leads are a decaying tombstone, a butchered cat, and a little mute girl with ghastly, formless nightmares. Secretly, Ella suspects the worst, that God is abandoning them all. Because there is a serial killer. And he isn't going to stop.

It started in the Canyonlands with a violent cult, a depraved monstrousness unleashed upon the innocent and the misled. daddy says go to the church of the final days. Now, the last survivor has a story to tell and Karen Wiley is coerced into the unforgiving desert wilderness by a deadly game disguised as a righteous quest for the truth.

A dark, chilling and brilliantly written thriller set in the canyonlands of Utah.

Alex Chance was born in 1979 in Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, and was educated in Nottinghamshire and at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He lives in West London. The Final Days is his first novel.

The Final Days
Random House Australia
Author: Alex Chance
ISBN: 9780434017768
RRP: $32.95