Both a razor-sharp thriller and a poignant love story, this twisting tale of psychological suspense is Patterson's most compelling novel in years. Mark Darrow grew up in a small Ohio town with no real advantages beyond his intelligence and athletic ability. But thanks to the intervention of Lionel Farr - a professor at Caldwell, the local college - Darrow became an excellent student and, later, a superb trial lawyer. Now Farr asks his still-youthful protege for a life-altering favor. An embezzlement scandal has threatened Caldwell's very existence - would Darrow consider becoming its new president?
Archaeologist Annja Creed is more than curious when a decrepit, ancient - looking man visits her, claiming the end of the world is near. The stranger spins wild tales and speaks as if he actually knew King Arthur. But, strangest of all, he insists that Annja is the only one who can stop the horrible event that is about to happen.
"I'm the onion girl," Jilly Coppercorn insists. "Pull back the layers of my life, and you won't find anything at the core. Just a broken child. A hollow girl." But just like an onion, the story of Jilly Coppercorn lures us into its mysteries; its colorful coils of insistent elaboration; its pull into its deepest, self-apparent secret.
The book starts of by telling us about a monster who once came to Castle Rock - he was not a vampire, werewolf or ghoul but a cop named Frank Dodd with mental and sexual problems. This is in relation to the character in a previous King novel, The Dead Zone . Dodd killed himself after being discovered by the extra sensory perception of John Smith.
Desperation is the companion novel to King's The Regulators, which was published simultaneously under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Forget the more-or-less literary novels of recent years, like Dolores Claiborne.
