Logline: A firefighter goes on a dark quest for justice after the brutal murder of a loved one.
Paul Kelly is a good man, a firefighter and paramedic facing death and danger daily, selflessly risking his own safety for the sake of strangers. Paul has seen tragedy a thousand times, but it has never been his own. Until now...
A shocking crime. A loved one, brutally murdered. Paul's life is suddenly invaded by police, reporters, and the harsh glare of spotlights on a family's private grief. The alleged killer shows no sorrow, no remorse -- a teen sociopath whose dead eyes stare in sullen silence. Paul does not want blood or vengeance. He wants to know why.
Paul Kelly was a good man. But his obsession is drawing him into the darkest depths of the human soul. Where a terrible truth lurks in the darkness. And a price must be paid to bury the dead.
Professional Reviews
Publishers Weekly:
Paul Kelly is a firefighter and paramedic working the suburbs of New York, often seeing drug addicts, prostitutes and suicide and crime victims. After viewing tragedy after tragedy for years
on end, Paul is almost unflappable, except when those hurt are truly innocent, like the baby he rescues from a burning building. However, even Paul is surprised by his own transformation
after violence hits him hard and at home. One night, Kyra, his teenage daughter, is attacked and brutally strangled; all of Paul's efforts can't save her, and Kyra dies in his arms on the way to
the hospital. After the funeral and a brief time off from work, Paul resumes his shifts, but he is a changed man. When the police identify a suspect in the killing--a teenage psychopath--Paul
kidnaps the boy, torturing him to find some reason why he would have killed Kyra. In a stunning climactic scene with a surprise twist, readers realize just how far Paul's obsession drives
him. Spector (The Light at the End) is a strong writer who convincingly re-creates the dark, often gruesome world of paramedics and firefighters. Most impressive is his exploration into
Paul's character and how ordinary people cope with extraordinary grief and horror. Not for the faint of heart, Spector's latest is for lovers of the best psychological thrillers, along the lines of
Ruth Rendell's, and with national radio advertising and in-store displays, booksellers will have little difficulty bringing the book to readers' attention. Agent, Anthony Gardner. (Dec. 5)
Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Peter Straub says:
"In TO BURY THE DEAD, Craig Spector has achieved a mature, hard-won narrative authority that will be deeply gratifying to all, as well as to the many thousands of readers who have enjoyed his earlier work. The novel moves its protagonist from believable heroism into an equally convincing moral darkness terrible to behold, and it carries us with it every step along the way. This is what horror wants to be when it grows up: a vision of tragic inevitability rooted in character, ruthless and inexorably unfolding, yet shot through with the possibility of grace." -- Peter Straub
Richard Christian Matheson says:
"TO BURY THE DEAD is a riveting marvel; amid aching emotion are insights almost unbearably poignant, truths transcendent. The writing is exquisitely uneasy and holds the reader spellbound in a harrowing opera of loss and hope. This is a complex world where courage is religion and all things burn except faith. Spector has written a stunning novel." -- Richard Christian Matheson
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Reviews for "To Bury The Dead (paperback)"
Reviewed by Andrew Ceroni
3/9/2002
For parents who love and cherish their children, it is the most horrific, middle-of-the-night, cold sweat of a nightmare imaginable. Craig Spector’s tale of freefall helplessness, overwhelming grief, and seething rage is within a razor’s edge of being too realistic to bear. The main character, Paul Kelly, is a career EMT-Fire Rescue professional accustomed to creeping through burning buildings to save lives. When incomprehensible tragedy strikes his family, Kelly finds his core self melted down by dual raging infernos of anger and anguish to the most base of primal instincts. When the justice system doesn’t work, when what’s “legal” isn’t “right”, then “illegal” no longer seems “wrong”. TO BURY THE DEAD is raw, unnerving… and sucks a reader in like a vacuum and never lets go. Twists and turns through the plot’s smoke-filled corridors will keep you from seeing what lies just ahead, yet drive you to flipping pages toward it. A breath-stopping, heart-thumping thriller of a novel. Must-read.
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