March 1, 2022
An investigator hired to recover a rare book stolen from a storied New England boarding school runs into witchery, beheadings, and other, stranger things. It's the Reagan 1980s. Insurance investigator Sam Gregory, a chain-smoking Vietnam veteran suffering from PSTD, assumes he'll be slumming through another drab case when he arrives at Danforth Putnam boarding school--even if it is a ridiculously posh facility located on its own small island 20 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. Quick with a backhand quip and well practiced at physical stuff, he does his best to amuse himself in his dealings with stuffy administrators and the usual spoiled rich kids, including a drug dealer who's in over his head. Then a student disappears and both Sam and an intrepid student reporter named Harriet (as in "the Spy") are threatened. A dungeon master in the Dungeons & Dragons club who suffers from mysterious seizures, Harriet is scared out of her wits when she encounters hooded evildoers and deadly snakes in a secret underground tunnel. Refusing to back down from her efforts to expose the dark origins of the school, which was founded in 1654--40 years before the Salem witch trials--she ultimately needs to be saved by Sam, who jokes less and less as things get weirder and weirder. Plot twists await. Lloyd, a TV writer and producer (Modern Family, How I Met Your Mother), is initially pretty comfortable in what is basically YA territory, Grateful Dead references notwithstanding. But his version of hell breaking loose is pretty underwhelming. An agreeable but ultimately out-of-its-depth occult thriller.
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March 7, 2022
TV producer and writer Lloyd’s middling debut, a gory horror thriller set in the 1980s, starts strongly, but underdeveloped characters and a familiar plotline undercut the momentum. Hard-boiled insurance investigator Sam Gregory, a Korean War vet, is dispatched by his employer to Danforth Putnam, an upscale prep school located on its own island off the Massachusetts coast. A valuable 11th-century manuscript was stolen from a supposedly uncrackable library safe, a crime the police don’t take seriously. Sam interviews students and staff members to get some leads, an inquiry that coincides with a rampage on the island by a possibly demonic something that cuts a bloody swath through the island’s residents. The slaughter gives the gumshoe another, and more pressing, mystery to solve at his own peril. The unremarkable depiction of a creepy boarding school harboring dark secrets from its past matches a climax unlikely to impress or surprise those who have read this kind of book before. Seekers of genuine scares will have to look elsewhere. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment.
April 1, 2022
DEBUT Sam is a military vet with serious PTSD, now working as an insurance company investigator. He's called to an isolated boarding school off the coast of Massachusetts to settle a claim they have made on an irreplaceable rare book. Harriet is a headstrong, Dungeons & Dragons--loving school newspaper reporter who is sick and tired of being bullied. At first separately, in alternating story lines, and then slowly converging as they work together, Sam and Harriet come to realize that there is more going on at Danforth Putman than meets the eye. There is an occult force underpinning the centuries-old school, one that has wielded its power through that missing book, and that may be connected directly to the Devil himself. In this compelling horror thriller with very wide appeal, Lloyd builds a strong sense of place, claustrophobic and unsettling, that draws readers into the disturbing mystery before unleashing a stunning, sinister, and thought-provoking twist that will devastate readers and leave them begging for another Sam and Harriet adventure. VERDICT While it would be easy to underestimate this novel as a Riverdale or Stranger Things knockoff, especially since Lloyd is an award-winning TV writer and producer (Modern Family; How I Met Your Mother), the story is definitely more adult, as if Jack Reacher were called to the creepy school in Sarah Read's The Bone Weaver's Orchard.--Becky Spratford
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