Light Before Day

In California’s Central Valley, an explosion of white-hot methamphetamine rips through a trailer, its blinding flash killing a dedicated schoolteacher in search of a student whose life is in danger….

In West Hollywood, a young reporter discovers that a Marine helicopter pilot visited the gay ghetto – just days before he sent his chopper spiraling into the Pacific Ocean…

And in the wilds of California’s Coast Ranges, a mercilessly angry young woman pursues the mythic killer she believes has murdered her mother…

So begins Light Before Day, a dark new thriller of revenge and sexual obsession from New York Times best-selling author Christopher Rice.

Twenty-six-year-old Adam Murphy is chasing a career-making story when he is suspiciously fired by the magazine that employs him. Scarred by the failure of a recent relationship, and haunted by the death of his alcoholic mother, Adam finds himself cut adrift in the city of West Hollywood. Determined to expose the facts behind the suicide of the Marine pilot, he discovers that his estranged lover has vanished without a trace, and that his disappearance matches several other recent missing persons cases. Working with his new boss, James Wilton – a famously curmudgeonly mystery novelist with his own battle scars, who is eager for a new case to write about – Adam begins to suspect a serial killer is preying on the city’s young gay men.

Meanwhile, Caroline Hughes, an intense young surgical resident, scours central California, also seeking a serial killer: an avenger of such legendary violence he seems more demon than man.

The truth that Adam, Caroline, and James Wilton discover is far more diabolical than they could have ever imagined.

From the mansion-strung Hollywood Hills to the drug-ravaged hamlets of the Central Valley, they enter a labyrinth that leads to the darkest core of the human heart -uncovering a conspiracy so extraordinary that it threatens both their sanity and their lives.

Light Before Day is a riveting and complex mystery set within a gothic twenty-first-century California landscape that Rice makes his own.