Bed of Nails — Michael Slade

“A get-under-your-skin thriller with machine-gun dialogue and impressive real-world research. It's one heck of a ride . . . not for the faint of heart.” -- CNN.com
 
Canadian Mountie Zinc Chandler knows he's facing down a psychopath when he's called to the scene of murder at a Vancouver hotel. There, he finds the body of a Hollywood producer suspended upside down like the Hanged Man tarot card, a crown of nails hammered into his head. When similar corpses turn up across the border in Seattle, Chandler is soon trailing a serial killer he is all too familiar with: his old enemy, the Ripper. But how can that be, when Chandler already put the murderer behind bars? 
 
To solve the mystery, Chandler must look back in time to 1888, when London was terrorized by its own demented Jack the Ripper, and into the weird world of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
 
His search takes him from the streets of Vancouver to the fantasy realm of the Goths at the World Horror Convention in Seattle to a nail-biting climax in the Kingdom of Bones on the cannibal island of Tangaroa in the South Pacific, where suddenly Chandler is in a struggle for his own survival.
 
“Bed of Nails could stand tall beside the horror-ific works of Stephen King or Anne Rice.” -- Halifax Daily News