John Katzenbach demuestra su destreza para provocar la tensión en el
lector, tal como hiciera en El psicoanalista.
Francis Petrel tenía poco más de veinte años cuando su familia lo
recluyó en el psiquiátrico tras una conducta imprevisible que culminó en
una crisis. Pero un reencuentro en los terrenos de la clausurada
institución remueve algo profundo en la mente agitada de Francis: unos
recuerdos sombríos, que él creía haber enterrado, sobre los truculentos
hechos que condujeron al cierre del Western State Hospital, y el
asesinato sin resolver de una joven enfermera, cuyo cadáver mutilado fue
encontrado una noche después de que se apagaran las luces. La policia
sospecho de un paciente, pero solo ahora, con la reaparicion del
asesino, se conocera la respuesta.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
It's been twenty years since Western State Hospital was closed down and
the last of its inmates reintegrated into society. Francis Petrel was
barely out of his teens when his family committed him to the asylum,
after his erratic behavior culminated in a terrifying outburst. Now
middle-aged, he leads an aimless, solitary life housed in a cheap
apartment, periodically tended to by his sisters, and perpetually
medicated to quiet the chorus of voices in his head. But a reunion on
the grounds of the shuttered institution stirs something deep in
Francis's troubled mind: dark memories he thought he had laid to rest,
about the grisly events that led to Western State Hospital's demise.
It begins in 1979, when twenty-one-year-old Petrel descends into the
state-run purgatory of an overcrowded, understaffed Massachusetts mental
hospital. Surrounded by inmates roaming the halls like drugged zombies
and raving behind locked doors, well-meaning orderlies, jaded nurses,
and patronizing doctors, Francis finds friendship with a motley
assortment of fellow patients: a would-be Napoleon, a wise
ex-firefighter, and a man obsessed with battling imagined devils. But
there's nothing imaginary about the young nurse found sexually assaulted
and brutally murdered late one night after lights-out.
The police suspect an inmate, while patients whisper about visions of a
white-shrouded "angel." But the striking and mysterious prosecuting
attorney who arrives to investigate has her own chilling theory--about
the grim, telltale "signature" left on the victim's body, a string of
unsolved sex killings, and a very real devil who, by chance or design,
has come to turn a madhouse into a slaughterhouse.
Now, with the past creeping back to haunt his thoughts, and nothing but
a pencil and the bare walls of his bleak apartment, Francis surrenders
to the overwhelming need to tell the story of those nightmarish days.
But because the crime was never solved, it's a story doomed to remain
unfinished. Until, like Francis's long-buried recollections, the killer
resurfaces . . . with a vengeance.
A tour de force narrative journey through the eerily unpredictable mind
of an utterly unusual hero, The Madman's Tale will keep even the most
astute thriller reader uncertain, unnerved, and unable to resist the
tantalizing twists and turns of this fiendishly suspenseful shadow show.
