Jack Kerley is an American author. He spent 20 years in a successful advertising career before writing his first book. He currently lives in Newport, Kentucky, and is married with two children.
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Jack Kerley is the author of the Carson Ryder novels, with the seventh installment due in summer of 2010. His short stories are "Almost There", published in Southern Review, Spring 2004, University of Louisiana Press, and "A Season of Moles", published in Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe' III: Anthology of Southern Writers, McAdam/Cage, 2004, ed. Sonny Brewer. Kerley's second book, The Death Collectors, was voted "Best Mystery Novel of the Decade" in Japan. Kerley's books have been translated into ten languages and published primarily in England now.
Bizarre writings are found on two corpses in Mobile, Alabama. Detective Carson Ryder and Harry Nautilus, the two man team of PSIT (the Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team), are launched into a search to find the killer. In the process, Ryder reveals the terrible truth about his past; his brother Jeremy is a convicted serial killer, who often provides Ryder with information about the mentality of the killers he faces.
In 1972, the day he is being sentenced, well known artist and serial killer Marsden Hexcamp is shot to death in the courtroom. The members of his Mansonesque cult are imprisoned or vanish. 30 years later, a possible prostitute is found dead, in a motel room full of candles, resembling Marsden Hexcamp's first murder. Soon after Marsden's artwork is sent to many of his remaining followers, and shortly after his followers see his artwork, they are killed by an unknown assailiant. Detective Carson Ryder and Harry Nautilus, the only members of the Pyschopathilogical and Sociopathilogical Investigation Team, or PSIT, are put on the case. Following the artwork they descend into the world of the Death Collectors, people who spend obscene amounts of money to own memorabilia of serial killers.
It looked like an abattoir when Carson Ryder and Harry Nautilus found the mutilated body of the young journalist. What looks like the work of a lone madman spreads tentacles that wrap themselves round all sorts of strange areas, including the city's most unlikely suspects: the wealthy family whose philanthropy has made them famous and influential. Behind their money and smiles is a family divided by hatred, a family whose strange and horrific past is about to engulf everyone around them - including Ryder.
Children are disappearing in Mobile, Alabama, the latest snatched from her own bedroom. There are no clues -- and, as yet, no bodies. Homicide Detective Carson Ryder is called in to investigate the abductions only to find the case tangled up in murky departmental and civic politics. Public rage is reaching dangerous levels, and Ryder's bosses turn for help to ex-Detective Conner Sandhill whose uncanny ability to spot connections and details missed by others is legendary -- but who left the department under a cloud. Ryder and Sandhill form an uneasy alliance in the hunt for the missing children, a hunt which becomes all the more urgent for tragic personal reasons. But at the root of these disappearances is something truly evil, and its source is closer to home than either could have imagined.
The spine-chilling serial killer thriller featuring Carson Ryder - the homicide detective with a hidden secret that could destroy his career These brothers have murder in their veins. Detective Carson Ryder's sworn duty is to track killers down. He's never revealed the fact that his brother, Jeremy, is one of America's most notorious killers - now imprisoned. Secretly, Ryder has used Jeremy's homicidal insight to solve cases. He's made a career out of it. Now his brother's escaped and is at large in New York. With Jeremy the chief suspect in a series of horrifying mutilation-murders, a mysterious video demands Ryder be brought into help. It looks like a straightforward manhunt. It couldn't be more different - or more terrifying. A dangerous cat-and-mouse game develops between Jeremy, and the NYPD with Ryder in the middle, trying to keep his brother alive and the cops in the dark. But it's a game of life, death and deceit, a game with an unknown number of players and no clear way of winning.