BLACK MOUNTAIN

BLACK MOUNTAIN is the second book in Laird Barron's great new private investigator series featuring Isaiah Coleridge, following Blood Standard.

Ex-mob enforcer Isaiah Coledrige has hung out a shingle as a private eye in New York's Hudson Valley, and in his newest case, a seemingly simple murder investigation leads him to the most terrifying enemy he has ever faced.

When a small-time criminal named Harold Lee turns up in the Ashokan reservoir sans a heartbeat, head, or hands, the local mafia capo hires Isaiah Coleridge to look into the matter. The mob likes crime, but only the crime it controls. and as it turns out, Lee is the second independent contractor to meet a bad end on the business side of a serrated knife. One such death can be overlooked. Two makes a man wonder.

A guy in Lee's business would make his fair share of enemies, and it seems a likely case of pure revenge. But as Coleridge turns over more stones, he finds himself dragged into something deeper and more insidious than he could have imagined, in a labyrinthine case spanning decades. At the center are an heiress moonlighting as a cabaret dancer, a powerful corporation with high-placed connections, and a serial killer who may have been honing his skills since the Vietnam War.


Laird Barron is the author of several short-story collections and three novels, and his work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. A multiple Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Award nominee, he is also a three-time winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Kingston, in upstate New York.