The Scarred Man

A ghost story forces a man to confront the darkest secret of his pastChristmas is lonely for a man with no family, and Mike North is grateful when his boss invites him to spend the holiday at his cabin upstate. But as a blizzard descends and conversation dries up, Mike regrets leaving New York City. Only the arrival of Susannah, his boss’s daughter, saves him from going mad with boredom. She is quick-witted and beautiful, a perfect antidote to snow-bound tedium, and he begins to fall in love. For Christmas night entertainment, Mike invents a ghost story. It goes all right until Susannah starts to scream. Something in his half-baked melodrama about a Chicago serial killer haunted by a man with a scarred face has touched a nerve. Unknowingly, Mike described a scene that matches Susannah’s nightmares. Soon, what had been a dream begins to intrude into reality. To understand her terror, Mike digs into his own memory, hoping to unearth the secret that gave birth to the scarred man.

From Publishers Weekly

Journalist Michael North terrifies a young student with a ghost story that soon frightens them both in this fast-paced but tame thriller. Invited to spend Christmas at the home of his boss, Carl McGill, Michael meets and falls for Carl's daughter Susannah. While his story about a scarred man is fictitious, Susannah's worst nightmares come to concern a killer with a scar. Someone tries to kill her later at college, and an answering-machine message from a self-proclaimed "scarred man" leads to an attempt on both Michael and Susannah's lives. Michael then remembers that his parents were murdered when he was five, and a scarred man dominates the sudden memory. Hiding with him at the time was a one-year-old girl, and it dawns upon the lovers that they may be siblings. Together they drive to Hickman, Ind., where Michael's parents were murdered, to learn the truth. Lawyer Howard Marks, who represents a retarded handyman still blamed for the killings, proves to Michael that the man was in fact framed. But who, then, is the scarred man? His identity is the best surprise mustered by Peterson (nom de plume of Andrew Klavan, A Shock to the System ), but it fails to offset others quite easily guessed. A playful style dilutes the impact of a novel already weakened by a dearth of suspense. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Michael North's life is irreversibly altered when he meets his employer's daughter during Christmas holiday. One night he tells a particularly scary ghost story abut a mysterious scarred man, and is amazed at the young woman's horrified reaction. It turns out the two of them have been experiencing similar nightmares for years. As they combine forces and discover more about their backgrounds, they become embroiled in an old murder case and must confront a menace from the past. Generally the writing is excellent, although Peterson overdoes the device of deliberately repeating certain words or phrases in subsequent sentences, and occasionally the poetic language seems self-conscious and distracting. However, readers who are tuned in to Peterson's style will find a tense climax and surprising resolution awaiting them.- William Schoell, New YorkCopyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Publishers Weekly

“Fast-paced.”

Library Journal

“The writing is excellent . . . a tense climax and a surprising resolution.”

Publishing News

“Klavan’s style is hard, unflinching, with a wide seam of whiplash humor running through it that sets him well apart.”

About the Author

Andrew Klavan (b. 1954) is a highly successful author of thrillers and hard-boiled mysteries. Born in New York City, Klavan was raised on Long Island and attended college at the University of California at Berkeley. He published his first novel, Face of the Earth, in 1977, and continued writing mysteries throughout the 1980s, finding critical recognition when The Rain (1988) won an Edgar Award for best new paperback.Besides his crime fiction, Klavan has distinguished himself as an author of supernatural thrillers, most notably Don't Say a Word (1991), which was made into a film starring Michael Douglas. He has also created two ongoing series: Weiss and Bishop, a private-eye duo who made their debut in Dynamite Road (2003), and The Homelanders, a young-adult series about teenagers who fight radical Islam. Besides his fiction, Klavan writes regular opinion pieces for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. He lives in Southern California.

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