A childhood friend of Odd Thomas has disappeared and the worst is feared. But as Odd applies his unique talents, to communicate with the dead, to the task of finding the missing person, he discovers something worse than a dead body: he encounters an enemy of exceptional cunning and spirals into a vortex of terror. Around him will gather new allies and old, some living and some not. For in the battle to come, there can be no innocent bystanders, and...

Thomas Odd is a fry cook rumored to have the ability to talk to the dead. Odd is pulled inexorably to the sea, to a small California coastal town where nothing is as it seems. Now the forces arrayed against him have both official sanction and an infinitely more sinister authority ... and in this dark night of the soul dawn will come only after the most shattering revelations of all.

Nestled on a lonely stretch along the Pacific coast, quaint roadside outpost Harmony Corner offers everything a weary traveler needs-a cozy diner, a handy service station, a cluster of cottages . . . and the Harmony family homestead presiding over it all. But when Odd Thomas and company stop to spend the night, they discover that there's more to this secluded haven than meets the eye-and that between life and death, there is something more frightening...

"Two years after the cataclysmic events that sent him journeying into mystery, Odd Thomas, the intrepid fry cook who sees the dead and tries to help them, has traveled full circle, back to his beloved home town of Pico Mundo and the people he loves. He has come to save them--and perhaps humanity--from the full flowering of evil it is his destiny to confront, as he draws ever closer to the truth of the world and his place in it. Stronger, wiser than...