'Carroll orchestrates this smartly layered narrative with skill, and does force you to turn the pages...Adroit entertainment. File under 'beachwear' and use accordingly' Douglas Kennedy, The Times
'On the level of sheer sentence construction and his pellucid prose, Jonathan Carroll is among the most purely pleasing writers of the decade. Yet his elegant, entrancing novels have real depth' Kim Newman, Independent

When bestselling novelist Samuel Bayer decides it's time he wrote his 'great book', he chooses as his subject a true-life event that took place twenty years earlier in his home town, Crane's View. As a child Samuel discovered the body of teenage beauty Pauline Ostrova (commonly known as 'the beehive') floating in the Hudson river. Her boyfriend, Edward Durant, was arrested, imprisoned and died in gaol. But as he begins to examine why things happened, Samuel finds himself unearthing secrets which threaten to sour his rosy-hued childhood. This leads to devastating - and fatal - consequences for both himself and those around him...

Jonathan Carroll is a writer who infuriatingly refuges to be classified. His prizewinning novels have been consistently praised but inconsistently pigeon-holed as fantasy, twentieth-century horror, literary fiction and even crime thrillers. What most people do agree on, however, is that he is a master-storyteller, a writer with an unique ability to create something as wonderful and as crazy as anything seen on Twin Peaks
Jonathan Carroll was born in New York in 1949 to creative parents - his father was a writer whose film credits included The Hustler and his mother was an actress and lyricist who appeared in numerous Broadway musicals and films. After a rebellious youth that was curtailed when a friend was shot dead by the police, he graduated from Virginia University and then moved to Vienna to teach English. Although he has received invitations to teach in numerous cities, he continues to write, teach and live in Vienna with his wife, while his son attends college in New York State.
His novels have been translated into seventeen languages and his powerful writing and extraordinary imagination for ideas has earned him world-wide admiration. His fan base has grown steadily and includes such literary heavyweights as Pat Conroy, Stephen King, Michael Moorcock and Thomas Harris and also Jane Campion, Juliette Bincohe, Sting and the King of Poland. He has won the World Fantasy Award.

'Blending fairy tale, drama, magic realism and occult horror, the fiction of Jonathan Carroll is like no one else's. It begins with a careful sketch of 'real' life, takes a sudden 'turn into the fantastic, then careers toward ever more disorienting wonders until a final revelation or enigma' Washington Post