The Dog Hermit — David Stout

A five-year-old boy is missing. A veteran reporter is dead. Somewhere inside a small, struggling community, the reasons are shocking and murderous...

For Will Shafer, a newspaper editor in a city neigh-boring Long Creek, New York, the kidnapping of the son of a prominent citizen has struck too close to home. One of his reporters, sent to cover the case, has died. When Will goes to Long Creek himself, a canny FBI man gives him secret information about the kidnap-ping, and a lonely woman forces him to question his own life. Suddenly Will is sure he has found an explosive link between the missing boy and the reporter's death--and from that moment on he knows his life is in danger, and there is no one he can trust...