Shane Brian, Worst Nightmares

Worst Nightmares

Shane Brian

Vanguard, May 12 2009, $23.95

ISBN 9781593155148

In downtown Los Angeles homeless bum Albert K. Arnold accosts bestselling author Dermot Nolan at the latter's warehouse home. Dermot's first reaction is the visitor is crazy. Still, he accepts a manuscript from the derange person mostly to get him out of his face.

Nolan puts aside My Worst Nightmares, a journal of an abusive serial killer who catches his victims over his net site Dream Healer before committing atrocities based on the prey's biggest fear. When Arnold dies, Nolan takes a closer look at the manuscript. Suffering from writer's block since his last book was sold to Hollywood last year, Nolan and his wife adapt Arnold's book and publish it as his. However, there is one problem that surfaces with the plagiarism of the manuscript; evidence mounts that My Worst Nightmares records real homicides that make the writer a person of interest to LAPD, the FBI and a serial killer working the Internet to ensnare his targets.

Mindful of A Murder of Crows starring Cuba Gooding Jr., WORST NIGHTMARES is a terrific thriller as Nolan crumbling under writing pressure to produce his next novel takes a seemin shortcut that leaves him in a greater pressure cooker. Readers will know who his antagonist is, but not care as the fun in the tale is to see whether the novelist can extract himself and his wife out of peril from a lethal serial killer and with the law that believes he is the lethal serial killer.

Harriet Klausner