"Excellent, psychologically textured,..Stephen King is so widely acknowledged as America’s master of paranormal terrors that you can forget his real genius is for the everyday."

-- New York Times Book Review

"Mr. King makes palpable the longing and regret that arise out of calamity, and deftly renders the kindness and pettiness that can mark small-town life."

-- The Wall Street Journal

On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There’s no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues, and it’s more than a year before the man is identified.

And that’s just the beginning of the mystery. Because the mere they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still...?

No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Oashiell Hammett’s THE MALTESE FALCON and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world’s great storytellers presents a moving and surprising tale whose subject is nothing less than the nature of mystery itself...