In this tour de force of fear and suspense, Hall shows how one family’s dark past comes back to haunt its most remote member—and may ultimately cost him his life.
Overview
Hell’s Bay sends Thorn deep into the wilds of South Florida, in a story with all the haunting atmosphere of Deliverance and the sheer terror of Cape Fear.
Descended from pioneer stock, the Bateses are an aristocratic Floridian family with vast holdings in real estate and mining. When matriarch Abigail Bates is discovered drowned in the Peace River, a chain of events is set into motion, embroiling Thorn with a family he never knew he had and a fortune he doesn’t necessarily want.
Thorn is leading a fishing expedition into the isolated lakes and mangrove swamps of Hell’s Bay when Abigail’s son and beautiful granddaughter arrive, claiming Thorn as a long-lost relative and asking him to solve the woman’s murder. Little do they know that the killer is already on their trail. Soon their houseboat becomes a precarious island of safety in a landscape of escalating violence. What does the killer want? And why is their predator so enraged, determined to kill them all no matter what the cost?
As Marilyn Stasio said in The New York Times, “If violence can be poetic, Hall has the lyric voice for it.” In this tour de force of fear and suspense, Hall shows how one family’s dark past comes back to haunt its most remote member—and may ultimately cost him his life.
Praise
“If violence can be poetic, Hall has the lyric voice for it.” — Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
“The appeal of this multilayered novel lies in the authenticity of its evocation of the Everglades… The result is another compulsive page-turner from a master of suspense.” — Publisher’s Weekly
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Hell’s Bay also pays homage to one of my favorite novels…
James on Writing Hell’s Bay
My good friend, Geoff Colmes, a fishing guide in Islamorada, oversaw the construction of a shallow-draft houseboat that was designed to carry groups of five or six for overnight trips into the very shallow waters of the Everglades. I went along with Geoff on one of these multi-day trips. We were able to spend long hours fishing isolated backwaters in Everglades, using the skiffs that were towed behind the houseboat. Some of the spots we fished were so remote, we were very likely the first white men to ever set eyes on those waters.
Hell’s Bay also pays homage to one of my favorite novels, James Dickey’s Deliverance. Perhaps I was also inspired by John D. MacDonald’s Cape Fear, another novel featuring a dangerous houseboat journey.
In an early draft of the novel, I had intended to write primarily about the catastrophic environmental damage caused by the phosphate industry near Tampa. I did a good deal of research on that subject and was reluctant to give it up. But after I went on that houseboat expedition into the Everglades, I started to think of ways I could wed the two subjects together. Phosphate and fishing in the wilds of the Everglades.
As often happens with my books, when I have to find a way to weld two very different subjects together, my creative juices begin to flow.
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We check in with Thorn over at Snappers or Lorelei every once in a while. Maybe he’ll have some new stories to tell us.
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