The Dog Hermit

Long Creek wasn't exactly the ideal spot to spend Thanksgiving weekend. Hard times had turned Hill County's once-thriving mill towns into poor, isolated, angry little hamlets. Yet Richard Brokaw, the wealthy cable television entrepreneur, had chosen to make his home there. And now his nine-year-old son, Jamie, has been brutally kidnapped.
The Bessemer Gazette hastily dispatches a veteran reporter to cover the story. But when he dies in what appears to be a drunk-driving accident, Executive Editor Will Shafer is called out of the warmth of a family holiday. With his reportorial skills rusty from long disuse, he is plunged into the bitter cold of an upstate New York winter, into the desperate search for a missing boy, and the baffling circumstances of a mentor's death.
Obsessed by elusive inconsistencies, following fragile threads that are cut short by yet another fatal accident, Shafer is stonewalled by hostile local police even as an old friend, an FBI agent, draws him into the center of the kidnapping investigation. As the two join forces to ferret out clues in the ransom notes, the readiness of the child's father to meet the kidnappers' rising demands raises disturbing questions. Is money really the issue? Do impoverished neighbors resent the wealthy man living in their midst? Or is the kidnapping yet another vicious tactic in the Brokaws' bitter divorce and custody battle?
The facts continue to confound Shafer and as the search intensifies, Jamie's harrowing ordeal takes a terrifying new twist. Deep in the snowbound wilderness, Jamie is delivered from his abductors into the hands of a man tormented by tragic memories...a man who may be even less willing to let him go. And, as events build to an explosive climax, Will Shafer - with far more at stake than an exclusive story - crosses the line between journalistic objectivity and deadly danger to discover just how far he will go...just how much he will risk to track down the chilling truth behind the kidnapping and corner a savage killer.