Carnage and a Well-Turned Phrase

THE SHADOW CATCHERS

By Thomas Lakeman

St. Martin's Minotaur. 321 pp. $23.95

If you read many thrillers, you'll soon realize that Thomas Lakeman's first novel, "The Shadow Catchers," brings together various plot elements that you know from other thrillers. The hero ventures innocently into a small town only to be caught up in a whirlwind of crime. The complex plot involves a serial killer, child abuse, horrific violence and a lust for revenge with roots deep in the past. As the body count nears double digits and a character intones, "There are dark powers at work in Dyer County," the shaken reader can only mutely assent. And yet, amid the mounting terror, the intrepid hero manages to romance not one but two attractive women. There's little new here, but the novel works because Lakeman relates his nightmare with skill, confidence and a sharp eye for detail -- he believes in his dark tale enough to make us buy it, too.

His hero, Mike Yeager, is an FBI agent in Philadelphia who's been put on leave after botching a case. He's driven his ancient Nash Rambler all the way to Nevada, where he intends to relax by photographing the Sangre de los Ni?os Mountains. If you speak a little Spanish, you'll know he's already in trouble because that means "blood of the children" and there's a sea of it ahead. He's been in little San Cristobal only long enough for a cup of coffee when he gets into a fight with a 300-pound ex-Marine, then is arrested, tossed in jail and accused of murder. But he's soon freed because the local sheriff, crusty old Rafe Archer, needs his help.

The sheriff "seemed not to have aged so much as eroded, until only the hardest and least forgiving part of him remained." He and his family are central to the story. He has twin daughters. One is a whore (legal in that part of Nevada) who is divorcing the 300-pound ex-Marine to live with her boyfriend/pimp. As the story starts, her young daughter is missing, maybe kidnapped, which leads the sheriff to recruit Yeager to help find her. The sheriff's other daughter is married to the town preacher, and she has her troubles, too. The plot kicks into high gear when the ex-Marine -- the father of the missing girl -- is decapitated.

Mayhem multiplies. A boy is "exsanguinated," which is to say bled dry. A woman is burned alive. Another is killed and embalmed. A troublesome cop is found alive in a grave with his eyes sewn shut and his feet cut off. The missing child's notebook encapsulates the horror with pictures of "children lying down in a burning building. Naked children hanging from hooks. Children cut to pieces like broken dolls." There is a madman at large, and plenty of suspicious characters around, but just as we start to suspect this or that person, he or she turns up dead.

Yeager, although a smarter cop than the locals, is just as baffled, and it doesn't help that a couple of fellows ambush him one night and beat him half to death. He is somewhat consoled by two women, but they prove not entirely to be trusted. Late one night he calls his girlfriend back in Philly, another FBI agent, only to have a man answer. In Nevada, between murders, he meets a pert schoolteacher ("Her brilliant blue eyes were ever so slightly crossed, giving her an air of perpetual curiosity"), but when he runs a background check on her, she has so dark a past that we must wonder if she might be the killer.

One reason we keep reading, amid the ever-widening gore, is that Lakeman, an Alabaman, has a nice touch with dialogue and descriptions. The irreverent old sheriff tells the preacher, "Yeah, well, you can teach a mynah bird to sing 'Rock of Ages,' it don't mean he's goin' to Heaven," and says of an angry coroner, "It don't take much to tread on his corns." The pretty schoolteacher, meeting Yeager, says, "Will you be my friend? That's how my kids say hello to each other. They haven't discovered rejection yet." A professor is the kind of fellow "who knew the name of Shakespeare's English Setter but couldn't find his own socks."

Yeager, beaten and battered, looks in the mirror and sees "a face only a mother could love. On payday." Such bits of humor aside, Lakeman has set out in his first novel to present a vision of Hell, of pure evil, and to a considerable degree he has succeeded. State-of-the-art violence may not be your idea of fun, but if it is, "The Shadow Catchers" is an engrossing read.