By Dean Koontz, 2000

ISBN 0553582917

Past midnight, Chyna Shepherd, twenty- six, gazed out a moonlit window, unable to sleep on her first night in the Napa Valley home of her best friend's family. Instinct proves reliable. A murderous sociopath, Edgler Forman Vess, has entered the house, intent on killing everyone inside.

A self-proclaimed "homicidal adventure," Vess lives only to satisfy all appetites as the arise, to immense himself in sensation, t o live without fear, remorse or limits, to live with intensity. Chyna is trapped in his deadly orbit.Chyna is a survivor, toughened by a lifelong struggle for safety and self-respect. Now she will be tested as never before.

At first her sole aim is to get out alive-until, by chance, she learns the identity of Vess's next intended victim, a faraway innocent only she can save. Driven by a newly discovered thirst for meaning beyond mere self-preservation, Chyna musters every inner resource she has to save an endangered girl--as moment by moment, the terrifying threat Edgler Foreman Vess intensifies.

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