Publisher's Synopsis
"One of those 'can't stop reading' types of books...This novel will remain in your memory for a long time." - Patrick D. Smith, author of FOREVER ISLAND "Not a book to curl up with late at night." - Edward Falco "This Panhandle is deliciously evil, the source of nightmares and zombies." - Florida Times-Union In the Land of Sunshine, do the dead come back? And who's in charge of the travel arrangements? According to the tourist advertisements, the whole state is made up of beaches and theme parks and racetracks and shopping malls. But if you leave the interstate behind, here and there a bit of the Old Florida survives. In thick palmetto scrub and pine woods, beneath dark, fast-flowing rivers, hidden in long-suppressed family secrets, kept alive by tradition and superstition...and something even more sinister. After Kay Abbott's husband dies suddenly in Miami, she wants to escape grief and start over. So she packs up and takes her daughter to live in a house inherited from his family, in a small town in the rural Panhandle. But Kay hasn't really left her problems behind. And in Jack's hometown she's inherited new ones: an old house with things to hide, a creepy, lecherous realtor, a wandering little girl, a local witch, and a husband who simply won't stay buried. In Abaton the past is only prologue - and the dead haven't gone far away at all.
