Jigsaw Part II

Picking up after JIGSAW (2010, ) book one in this series, in 2017's new JIGSAW PART II, Capt. Cape Thomas has suffered a gunshot wound to the head, rendering him semi-comatose for over three years. On the eve of his discharge from the hospital after two more years of physical therapy, a night nurse--either a figment of his imagination or his worst living nightmare--attacks him out of nowhere. Convinced in daylight by staff and his doctor that the attack was a trick of a healing mind, Cape bids farewell to the facility, his home for the past five years. Once home with family in the Fisher mansion, strange things continue to beset him. Nooses and miniature coffins turn up in odd places and Cape begins to suspect that his old nemeses, Walter Cronus Kress and William Johnston, are responsible. These new terrors are real, but the cause for this unwanted, and ostensibly unwarranted, attention is still murky. Cape, determined to keep his family safe, moves from the mansion back to his own home. On the way there, he is hunted by an archer and almost killed. Managing to escape, he reports the crime to the local sheriff, a smart, charming woman whose looks could stop an eight-day clock. Sheriff Scarlett DuBois investigates Cape's claim of being targeted, but she soon dismisses the incident as a hunting accident blown out of proportion by a man with lingering brain damage. Cape returns to his home place only to find it's no safe haven, either. Nooses and other strange appearances send him out on the road again, this time to Charlotte, to warn his former lover, Ally Kress, that her imprisoned ex-husband, Walter Cronus Kress, is up to his old tricks-this time planning both their murders. Instead of a warm welcome from Ally, though, Cape receives the news that she is very recently dead-but that just before, she too received nooses and miniature coffins out of nowhere to terrorize her and her household. Before Cape can warn Ally's daughter, the film star Celine Seabolt, that she is in danger, the younger beauty also is murdered: this time Cape Thomas is the prime suspect. Danger is clearly around every corner of each city and town, it's down in the thick riparian woods, and just off every interstate in North Carolina, so Cape turns to alcohol for solace. A bar fight leads him to the drunk tank and then to a vicious fight in the county lockup. Yes, Cape Thomas, former 747 airline pilot for Aeromax out of Atlanta, should've heeded good family advice and remained under the keep of highly-trained security-in-residence at the Fisher mansion. But no, he would not. And now when Detective Darius Martin has no choice but to release Cape Thomas from the clink, lacking sufficient evidence to charge him with murder, Cape is entirely on his own. A well-meaning, fun-loving pilot, a little dotty, sure, from his head-wound recovery, and weakened by grief for the fresh deaths of his old friends, he is just "out there" on the road, alone yet determined to find and lock up the real murderers. Who, conterminously, are still after him. So that he and his family escape the fate of Ally and her daughter, Cape decides to be impossible to find while he seeks his attacker or attackers-nuts to the unbelieving cops! He goes off the grid to an old farmhouse near tangled, swampy land on the bank of the Northeast Cape Fear River. The place is owned by Miss Minnie Reynaud, the shaman who raised him as his surrogate mother. Then before he fully settles in, he gets a wellness visit from Sheriff Scarlett DuBois. The relationship heats up, as does more sudden terror and danger to both. Unlikely heroes and well-disguised villains take the reader to an unexpected ending-and more-down by the riverside. Another plus: the reader learns the surprising meaning of the book's title, JIGSAW. And yet another: the reader discovers humor and terror woven together at every degree of the compass. Stay tuned for JIGSAW PART III.