It was truly a crime against innocents. Eleven dolphins, part of an experiment in healing, are found slaughtered in their saltwater tanks. When Thorn investigates, he triggers a vicious attack that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down, plagued by unrelenting pain. Now Thorn, a Florida renegade who has lived a life of fierce freedom, is starting over in a wheelchair, bitter enough to drive his lover away, desperate enough to seek miracles on the fringes of medical science--where his childhood friend, now a doctor, is doing cutting-edge research in a quest for the ultimate painkiller.
Bean Wilson was once destined for greatness. Then came the war in Vietnam, a debilitating injury, and a simmering rage. Now Bean is running a pain-relief clinic in Key West, assisted by a beautiful six-foot-tall island girl named Pepper Tremaine, who chews hot chilies like gum and carries a scalpel in her blouse. Under the guise of a respectable research facility, Bean and Pepper are using human beings as lab rats, then feeding the bodies of their failures to the shark-churned sea. Within hours of entering the clinic, Thorn can sense the danger. But when he begins to make the bizarre connection between eleven dead dolphins and Bean's clinic, the stakes are raised. Because Dr. Bean Wilson, a man who knows exactly how an amputated limb can scream with real, unbearable agony, may be on the brink of the most dangerous discovery of all: a cure for human pain. And in a climax that explodes with the kind of secrets that can turn friends into enemies and lovers into strangers, Red Sky At Night races toward a harrowing showdown between Thorn, imprisoned in a wheelchair, and a mad, ruthless doctor who will stop at nothing to cure his own twisted pain.
A full-throttle thriller of unparalleled suspense, Red Sky At Night is also a powerful human drama. For here are the hurts that afflict the body, mind, and spirit. And here is the wounded love between old friends and rivals: the twisted love between the beautiful, rough-hewn Pepper Tremaine and the doctor she worships, and, ultimately, the love risked between Thorn, caught in his bitterness and his rage, and a good woman willing to stay with him to the end.
From Library Journal
Thorn, last spotted in the best-selling Buzz Cut (LJ 5/15/96), must come to grips with his own paralysis?the result of a savage beating?while holed up in a pain clinic run by a mad scientist. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Hall's hermit-sleuth Thorn has long been one of the most appealing and complex characters in crime fiction, but here he extends his range still further, taking the Travis McGee^-style genre hero to an altogether new level. Ensconced in his Key Largo beach house, Thorn seems to have carved a lasting separate peace with the modern world until a senseless crime drives the other side of his personality to the fore, the side that says, "There's something broken, and I have to fix it." What's broken this time, though, is Thorn himself, mysteriously paralyzed from the waist down after attempting to confront an apparent prowler. The story begins with the slaughter of several dolphins--killed for their endorphins, the key ingredient in a miracle, pain-killing drug--and extends to Thorn's distant past and his relationship with his best childhood friend, who has been nursing a grudge against Thorn for decades. All of Thorn's unresolved conflicts--Is he running away from the world or trying to save it?--come to the fore here, as Hall makes his hero (and the reader) face simultaneously the pain of powerlessness and the selfishness at the heart of a knight errant's gallantry. And yet, we cheer when Thorn sallies forth one more time, wheelchair-bound but determined to draw on the "white knot of gristle at his stubborn core." Melding the magnetic pull of the archetypal hero on a quest with the flesh-and-blood humanity of a vulnerable man trapped between conflicting needs, Hall masterfully works both ends of the genre street, transforming the beach-bum sleuth into an everyman while at the same time allowing readers to wonder if perhaps we, too, might find a stubborn core of our own, if only we plumbed deep enough. Popular fiction at its absolute best. Bill Ott
Description:
It was truly a crime against innocents. Eleven dolphins, part of an experiment in healing, are found slaughtered in their saltwater tanks. When Thorn investigates, he triggers a vicious attack that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down, plagued by unrelenting pain. Now Thorn, a Florida renegade who has lived a life of fierce freedom, is starting over in a wheelchair, bitter enough to drive his lover away, desperate enough to seek miracles on the fringes of medical science--where his childhood friend, now a doctor, is doing
cutting-edge research in a quest for the ultimate painkiller.
Bean Wilson was once destined for greatness. Then came the war in Vietnam, a debilitating injury, and a simmering rage. Now Bean is running a pain-relief clinic in Key West, assisted by a beautiful six-foot-tall island girl named Pepper Tremaine, who chews hot chilies like gum and carries a scalpel in her blouse. Under the guise of a respectable research facility, Bean and Pepper are using human beings as lab rats, then feeding the bodies of their failures to the shark-churned sea. Within hours of entering the clinic, Thorn can sense the danger. But when he begins to make the bizarre connection between eleven dead dolphins and Bean's clinic, the stakes are raised. Because Dr. Bean Wilson, a man who knows exactly how an amputated limb can scream with real, unbearable agony, may be on the brink of the most dangerous discovery of all: a cure for human pain. And in a climax that explodes with the kind of secrets that can turn friends into enemies and lovers into strangers, Red Sky At Night races toward a harrowing showdown between Thorn, imprisoned in a wheelchair, and a mad, ruthless doctor who will stop at nothing to cure his own twisted pain.
A full-throttle thriller of unparalleled suspense, Red Sky At Night is also a powerful human drama. For here are the hurts that afflict the body, mind, and spirit. And here is the wounded love between old friends and rivals: the twisted love between the beautiful, rough-hewn Pepper Tremaine and the doctor she worships, and, ultimately, the love risked between Thorn, caught in his bitterness and his rage, and a good woman willing to stay with him to the end.
From Library Journal
Thorn, last spotted in the best-selling Buzz Cut (LJ 5/15/96), must come to grips with his own paralysis?the result of a savage beating?while holed up in a pain clinic run by a mad scientist.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Hall's hermit-sleuth Thorn has long been one of the most appealing and complex characters in crime fiction, but here he extends his range still further, taking the Travis McGee^-style genre hero to an altogether new level. Ensconced in his Key Largo beach house, Thorn seems to have carved a lasting separate peace with the modern world until a senseless crime drives the other side of his personality to the fore, the side that says, "There's something broken, and I have to fix it." What's broken this time, though, is Thorn himself, mysteriously paralyzed from the waist down after attempting to confront an apparent prowler. The story begins with the slaughter of several dolphins--killed for their endorphins, the key ingredient in a miracle, pain-killing drug--and extends to Thorn's distant past and his relationship with his best childhood friend, who has been nursing a grudge against Thorn for decades. All of Thorn's unresolved conflicts--Is he running away from the world or trying to save it?--come to the fore here, as Hall makes his hero (and the reader) face simultaneously the pain of powerlessness and the selfishness at the heart of a knight errant's gallantry. And yet, we cheer when Thorn sallies forth one more time, wheelchair-bound but determined to draw on the "white knot of gristle at his stubborn core." Melding the magnetic pull of the archetypal hero on a quest with the flesh-and-blood humanity of a vulnerable man trapped between conflicting needs, Hall masterfully works both ends of the genre street, transforming the beach-bum sleuth into an everyman while at the same time allowing readers to wonder if perhaps we, too, might find a stubborn core of our own, if only we plumbed deep enough. Popular fiction at its absolute best. Bill Ott