"...A horror story that will keep you awake at night. It made the hairs on my neck stand. I really enjoyed this book about a creature out on the loose and killing. One man knows what the thing is but he also knows it's unbeatable. He knows what he has to do...M. J. Konevich has written a page-turner. If you like horror stories, be sure to read this one, it's more horror than you can imagine. This book should be on the bookshelf, next to the books from Stephen King."--Euro-Reviews

...Devon Michaels was the unofficial “official” police officer for the town of Halpert, New Hampshire. He had been nominated for the position over twenty years ago because he had seen significant action in Nixon’s little war. It was a non-paying job with benefits, which meant that he didn’t receive any official pay on the books, but was given a quarterly stipend from the town and a car and a handgun. No badge was supplied, but everyone in the four hundred-person town knew old Devon and what his responsibilities were. And Devon himself, for his part, kept the peace by applying one simple rule: don’t be stupid and I won’t call you stupid.

Mostly Devon broke up high school kids drinking in the woods or diving into the quarries. Occasionally, he had to pull someone over for OUI or put Hal Corin in the drunk tank, but nothing exciting ever happened in Halpert, at least nothing that concerned him. That was until today.

“Totally fucked,” Devon muttered again as one of the volunteer deputies helped bag a pile of reddish-brown sludge that might have once been a functioning lower intestine. Devon lit a cigarette and exhaled a long white plume into the cool summer morning. His lungs and throat growled in protest, a man in his sixties shouldn’t smoke.

The phone call had come in around five-thirty this morning, just as the sun was rising above and between the White Mountains to the east. Normally, this was a peaceful time of the day, a time for coffee and dog walks, but not on this day. Oh, there might have been coffee, and even an early morning walk that followed, but the guy, or girl, who had taken it, was somehow ripped apart and partially eaten.

Eaten? he thought. Where did you get that?

“Too much is missing,” he said to himself under his breath. “It had to go somewhere.”

Chester Goring was an old farmer who lived by himself in an equally old farmhouse on the outskirts (if there really were any) of town. It turned out that Chester’s son, Charlie, was in town with his wife for the week to check up on Chester and show the wife where he grew up. They decided to take an early walk to watch the sun come up over the mountains, and what Charlie got instead was a dismembered corpse to show his wife. Not a typical morning in Halpert. Hell, the only people that died in Halpert died from old age or drink, usually a combination of the two. There hadn’t even been a hunting accident in ten years, and now this.

“We’re gonna have to call in the state police on this one, Dev,” Stanley Harris, one of the volunteers, said. “I mean we can’t handle this ourselves, can we?”

Stanley Harris owned the bait and tackle shop in town. In fact, his family had, at one point, owned most of the buildings in Halpert. Devon didn’t like him, not one bit. He thought Stanley was lazy and a coward, two things that Devon loathed. The only reason he even agreed to let Stanley help out was because Devon was a friend of Stanley’s father, Richard, who also served on the town selectmen committee. Stanley wasn’t a bad kid, per se; he just wasn’t cut out to do anything that involved manual labor. And one thing Stanley most definitely was not cut out for was bagging body parts. Yet Stanley still felt he was in a position to give Devon advice on the matter. Amazing.