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The Tower (Paperback)
Gregg Andrew Hurwitz
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R698
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See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. A deadly warning in a
deadly game.In the bestselling tradition of The Silence of the
Lambs comes The Tower, a novel of nail-biting suspense and
heart-stopping terror played out in a psychological battle of wit,
cunning, and pure evil between a diabolically clever killer and his
determined hunter.The Tower, nicknamed Alcatraz II by law
enforcement officials, is infamous as the world's foremost airtight
extreme maximum security prison. A futuristic building, it is
located offshore of San Francisco, and built to be 100 percent
escape-proof. The men who are condemned to spend the rest of their
lives there are the most dangerous, violent offenders in the prison
system -- men whose crimes have made it imperative that they be
separated from society, from one another, and from hope --
forever.Allander Atlasia, a psychopathic killer and himself the
victim of a horrible sexual attack as a child, has been sentenced
to the Tower for a series of gruesome crimes. But Atlasia manages
to do the impossible -- he breaks out of the prison. He makes his
way to the mainland and, armed with his own private agenda of hate
and murder, begins his killing spree, intent on re-enacting and
revenging the childhood tortures that turned him into a
monster.Jade Marlow is an ex-FBI agent who has been assigned to
hunt down and capture Atlasia. A self-described tracker, Marlow is
relentless, fearless, and brilliant -- a loose cannon in a private
struggle with his own demons. With a record of irrational behavior
and violence, and a kind of genius for putting himself into the
mind of a criminal predator that is itself a sort of madness,
Marlow may just be the only man smart and diabolical enough to
catch Atlasia.Atlasia's victims are the unfortunate bystanders in
this complex story of emotional and psychological horror, as they
fall prey to this madman's twisted re-enactment of his own depraved
past, as he rights the wrongs he feels have been visited upon him.
His message to his pursuers is delivered in a particularly chilling
manner, a literal realization of the old adage See no evil, hear no
evil, speak no evil.Two men -- one a sinister, inventive, pitiless
serial killer, the other a brilliant sleuth and hunter who bears
his own heavy burden of dark secrets and impulses -- play out a
deadly game against a background of increasingly brutal murders, in
which there are no rules but kill or be killed.Superbly written,
ingeniously plotted, and enormously entertaining, The Tower marks
the debut of a stunning new writer.
Shantyboat dwellers and steamboat roustabouts formed an organic
part of the cultural landscape of the Mississippi River bottoms
during the rise of industrial America and the twilight of steamboat
packets from 1875 to 1930. Nevertheless, both groups remain
understudied by scholars of the era. Most of what we know about
these laborers on the river comes not from the work of historians
but from travel accounts, novelists, songwriters, and early film
producers. As a result, images of these men and women are laden
with nostalgia and minstrelsy. Gregg Andrews's Shantyboats and
Roustabouts uses the waterfront squatter settlements and Black
entertainment district near the levee in St. Louis as a window into
the world of the river poor in the Mississippi Valley, exploring
their daily struggles and experiences and vividly describing people
heretofore obscured by classist and racist caricatures.
Insane Sisters is the extraordinary tale of two sisters, Mary Alice
Heinbach and Euphemia B. Koller, and their seventeen- year property
dispute against the nation's leading cement corporation - the Atlas
Portland Cement Company.In 1903, Atlas built a plant on the border
of the small community of Ilasco, located just outside Hannibal -
home of the infamous cave popularized in Mark Twain's most
acclaimed novels. The rich and powerful Atlas quickly appointed
itself as caretaker of Twain's heritage and sought to take control
of Ilasco. However, its authority was challenged in 1910 when
Heinbach inherited her husband's tract of land that formed much of
the unincorporated town site. On grounds that Heinbach's husband
had been in the advanced stages of alcoholism when she married him
the year before, some of Ilasco's political leaders and others who
had ties to Atlas challenged the will, charging Heinbach with undue
influence. To help fight against the local lawyers and politicians
who wanted Atlas to own the land, Heinbach enlisted the help of her
shrewd and combative sister, Euphemia Koller, by making her
co-owner of the tract. In a complex case that went to the Missouri
Supreme Court four times, the sisters fiercely sought to hang on to
the tract. However, in 1921 the county probate court imposed a
guardianship over Heinbach and a circuit judge ordered a sheriff's
sale of the property. After Atlas purchased the tract, Koller waged
a lonely battle to overturn the sale and expose the political
conspiracies that had led to Ilasco's conversion into a company
town. Her efforts ultimately resulted in her court- ordered
confinement in 1927 to Missouri's State Hospital Number One for the
Insane, where she remained until her death at age sixty-eight.
Insane Sisters traces the dire consequences the sisters suffered
and provides a fascinating look at how the intersection of gender,
class, and law shaped the history and politics of Ilasco. The book
also sheds valuable new light on the wider consolidation of
corporate capitalism and the use of guardianships and insanity to
punish unconventional women in the early twentieth century.
Mark Twain's boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, often brings to
mind romanticized images of Twain's fictional characters Huck Finn
or Tom Sawyer exploring caves and fishing from the banks of the
Mississippi River. In "City of Dust, " Gregg Andrews tells another
story of the Hannibal area, the very real story of the exploitation
and eventual destruction of Ilasco, Missouri, an industrial town
created to serve the purposes of the Atlas Portland Cement
Company.
In this new edition, Andrews provides an introduction detailing
the impact of this book since its initial publication in 1996. He
writes of a new twist in the Ilasco saga, one that concerns the
Continental Cement Company's attempt, not unlike Atlas's one
hundred years earlier, to manipulate the sale of a piece of land
near its plant in the town. He explores the uneasy relationship
between preservationists and the plant's CEO and officials in St.
Louis; the growing movement to preserve Ilasco's heritage,
including the building of a monument to commemorate the early
residents of the town; and the grassroots petition drive and
letter-writing campaign that stopped the Continental Cement
Company's machinations.
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