The Late Man — James Preston Girard

North of Wichita, Kansas, an ordinary field sits beside a narrow dirt road. An unknown, and perhaps unidentifiable, body lies there, the apparent victim - and the first in several years - of a local serial murderer. In James Preston Girard's deceptively spare yet thoroughly harrowing novel, this ugly death will draw to it three intriguing and sympathetic characters, each determined - and, we come to feel, fated - to resolve this brutal mystery. They are L. J. Loomis, a resourceful and honest detective whose life has already been soured by his pursuit of the unknown killer; Stosh Babicki, an earnest young reporter trapped in a relationship that threatens her own integrity; and the title character, Sam Haun, the night-desk man on the local paper, a man beset by grief and memory. What begins for them as an exercise of solemn procedure and by-the-book detection is transformed into a totally disorienting tale of uncertainty and fear, in which no fact and no one - whether in the glare of day on the Great Plains or the shadows of midnight - can be relied on or trusted. Already hailed by his fellow writers, James Preston Girard's The Late Man is a stunningly original and unnerving novel of suspense.
Starting with a search for a serial killer in the back woods of Kansas, The Late Man delves into the darker regions of the human spirit. Three fully realized characters become drawn into their own nightmarish worlds, where unmasking a killer's identity is but a small part of a larger obsession.