Deceiver

by Max Gersh

Overview

Some days God is hungry. Publishers Weekly: "Impressively creepy jump scares . . . bravura set pieces . . . well-crafted moments of suspense." A blind man on an office stairway . . . A corporate executive turned homicidal . . . And outside the office tower, hypnotic shapes swim in the fog. Kathy Bell's bad day is about to get worse. On the twenty-third floor, a man with a knife is being transformed into something awesome.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935797784
Publisher:	Perfect Crime Books
Publication date:	09/03/2017
Pages:	166
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.38(d)

About the Author

Max Gersh is the author of a previous novel, Wild Wood. His short fiction has appeared, under several bylines, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and has been nominated for Edgar, Derringer, Shamus and International Thriller Writers awards.

Editorial Reviews

07/31/2017
Gersh (Wild Wood) delivers impressively creepy jump scares but little substance in this contemporary supernatural thriller. Kathy Bell, a young stockbroker, is assaulted by what seem to be homeless people in the stairwell of her office building, but when she makes it through a fire door back into the building, she isn’t any safer. People start disappearing, the fog outside the windows develops powers of hypnosis, and the company owner has disemboweled himself with a knife, though he’s still walking around. Much of the novel consists of bravura set pieces with Kathy and others attempting to escape the inexplicable horrors, only to run directly into another set. The underlying explanation for the terrors in no way lives up to the well-crafted moments of suspense that lead to it. The characterization is also thin and superficial to the point of stereotype. Still, Gersh gets a lot of mileage out of his setup before it falls flat. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly