The Next

In The Quick, an International Horror Guild Award Nominee for Best First Novel, Dan Vining introduced an astonishing world peopled by "Sailors"-drifters between the worlds of the living and the dead, and one Sailor in particular, cynical private investigator Jimmy Miles. Now Jimmy is trailing a mysterious woman to San Francisco where he will confront his own tragic obsessions and troubling past, a seductive femme fatale, and the terrifying true mission of the Sailors.

From Publishers Weekly

Vining adeptly blends crime and the supernatural in his second noir outing, just as he did in his well-received debut, The Quick (2004). PI Jimmy Miles, who's a "Sailor" (i.e., a human who has died but lives again with another's face), leaves his usual L.A. turf for San Francisco, where he's been hired to tail a woman bent on self-destruction who may be the victim of a cult that has encouraged a rash of suicides. Moving between the normal world and the hidden underculture of the Sailors, Miles works frantically to stave off further tragedy. While later plot developments fall short of the pulse-pounding opening, which will remind genre fans of some of Frank Robinson's best work (The Power; Waiting), the author has created a neat alternate universe and successfully taps into big-city nihilism and despair. (Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Here's an uneven mixture of noir mystery and supernatural thriller. Jimmy Miles is a private eye whose trailing of a young woman leads him to explore his own life, in particular, certain aspects of his past. Sounds simple enough, except that the young woman is a member of a supernatural sect called the Sailors. Vining writes with enthusiasm, but he assembles the puzzle of the Sailors a bit too slowly to hold most readers' interest. Still, supernatural-thriller devotees will be interested in watching this projected series develop. David PittCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Dan Vining has worked as a screenwriter, newspaper reporter, and writer and editor at Rolling Stone. He was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, where he also taught.

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