Nightjars

Luke Oshel is on a first date one rainy night when the woman across the table goes to the restroom and does not return. Under her napkin she has left an old photograph of Luke as a boy. A corpse lies in the dark corner of his bedroom, and a masked man stands nearby. He remembers none of it.

More photos follow, showing Luke beside murder victims and covered in blood. The paranoia and buried memories he has spent years fighting come back. Drugs, alcohol, therapy and hypnosis never settled his deepest fear, that he carries the legacy of his father, who drained his victims of blood before he died.

Now a fresh series of killings is under way, and the evidence points at Luke. His search for the truth takes him into the Appalachians of North Georgia, where a threat closes in on his ex-wife and their young daughter. To stop it, he has to follow his father's darkness back to a secret that is centuries old.

The book is horror built as a thriller, in which a man is framed by his own missing memory. It leans on paranoia and dread, and it asks whether Luke is the monster he is hunting.