The idyllic facade of a small coastal tourist magnet hides its secrets well. But when the shining star pitcher of the girls’ softball team guns down the most popular boy in school, the shockwaves reverberate far beyond the school’s walls. In the wake of the killing, two of the town’s newer residents turn over deeply embedded rocks, exposing a subculture of almost unimaginable horror lurking beneath. Formerly a nurse with Médecins Sans Frontières, Dolly has become a defender and confidante to dozens of local teenage girls, and she refuses to accept that MaryLou (“Mighty Mary”) McCoy’s gunning down Cameron Taft in a high school hallway is a typical school shooting. Although MaryLou’s guilt is not in doubt—it’s even captured on the school’s security camera—the girl insists on a trial . . . but inexplicably refuses to cooperate with her own defense. Enlisting her troupe of teenagers and the local contacts she has cemented, Dolly calls on all of her resources to get to the truth . . . and to whatever secret MaryLou is guarding. When Dolly’s husband, Dell, sees his beloved wife begin her quest, he immediately signs on. A former mercenary and ex-Legionnaire, Dell treats this “job” as he would any other—with no boundaries. His entire arsenal is put into guile, extortion, tracking devices, shadow networks, and, finally, an act of terrorism that blows the cover off the soul-killing rite of passage demanded of the town’s most vulnerable girls. Dell’s discovery of MaryLou’s true motive and the community’s shocking failure to protect its children culminates in a decision to put the town itself on trial. The explosive verdict blows away the facade . . . and forces the village to stand in judgment of itself. The aftershocks keep coming until the foundation itself fractures, leaving cracks too deep to patch ever again.

Just before daybreak, a body washes up on a pristine beach. The dead man’s skull has been bashed open, and his upper body is covered in neo-Nazi tattoos. An anonymous photographer e-mails an image of the scene to the local news, spurring the police to instantaneous response. Searching for suspects at one of the town’s “homeless-by-choice” encampments, the cops pick up Homer, a “walking wounded” schizophrenic, who has been showing off a wristwatch he says God gave him. The watch is engraved with a symbol that exactly matches one of the dead man’s tattoos. Even though Homer could never have inflicted such damage on a man twice his weight and half his age, he is immediately arrested—tourism could suffer if a killer was known to be at large. Dolly’s friend Mack, the director and sole employee of the area’s mental-health outreach program, is outraged but helpless. Dolly is outraged, too, but with connections like Dell, she is anything but helpless. As the search for the real killer pulls them deeper into the world of hate-groups, Dell must share some of his “Dark Arts” knowledge with Mack. Together they make a shocking discovery just beneath the surface of this seemingly sublime little town.

Once a mercenary, later an assassin, and now living a different life, Dell has bone-marrow-deep loyalty and protective instincts that know no bounds when it comes to his wife, Dolly, a former battle-field nurse, and their close-knit group of Dolly’s friends and Dell’s allies. When Dolly receives a thinly veiled threat, Dell reverts to his old ways to untangle the background of a prominent local figure, George Byron Benton, whose actions have awakened Dell’s obsessive need for security. This target combines the deadly patience of a gila monster and a complex agenda—including a public life that’s all elaborate disguise. To penetrate Benton’s dense facade, Dell methodically works his way through the only reliable source of news in the area—a blog called Undercurrents . If he manages to track Benton down, Dell will have to decide how far he is willing to go to recapture the sense of safety that Benton has stolen. With Andrew Vachss’s trademark razor-sharp dialogue and inimitable prose style, SignWave—the third entry in the Aftershock series—is guaranteed to reverberate powerfully long after it has been read.