“You’ll flip pages nervously, scanning ahead quickly… As always, reading Hall is a pleasure. Especially when you don’t know who will be left standing at the end.”
— The Miami Herald
Overview
It was truly a crime against innocents.
Eleven dolphins, part of an experiment in healing, are found slaughtered in their saltwater tanks. When Thorn investigates, he triggers a vicious attack that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down, plagued by unrelenting pain. Now Thorn, a Florida renegade who has lived a life of fierce freedom, is starting over in a wheelchair, bitter enough to drive his lover away, desperate enough to seek miracles on the fringes of medical science–where his childhood friend, now a doctor, is doing
cutting-edge research in a quest for the ultimate painkiller.
Bean Wilson was once destined for greatness. Then came the war in Vietnam, a debilitating injury, and a simmering rage. Now Bean is running a pain-relief clinic in Key West, assisted by a beautiful six-foot-tall island girl named Pepper Tremaine, who chews hot chilies like gum and carries a scalpel in her blouse. Under the guise of a respectable research facility, Bean and Pepper are using human beings as lab rats, then feeding the bodies of their failures to the shark-churned sea. Within hours of entering the clinic, Thorn can sense the danger. But when he begins to make the bizarre connection between eleven dead dolphins and Bean’s clinic, the stakes are raised. Because Dr. Bean Wilson, a man who knows exactly how an amputated limb can scream with real, unbearable agony, may be on the brink of the most dangerous discovery of all: a cure for human pain. And in a climax that explodes with the kind of secrets that can turn friends into enemies and lovers into strangers, Red Sky At Night races toward a harrowing showdown between Thorn, imprisoned in a wheelchair, and a mad, ruthless doctor who will stop at nothing to cure his own twisted pain.
A full-throttle thriller of unparalleled suspense, Red Sky At Night is also a powerful human drama. For here are the hurts that afflict the body, mind, and spirit. And here is the wounded love between old friends and rivals: the twisted love between the beautiful, rough-hewn Pepper Tremaine and the doctor she worships, and, ultimately, the love risked between Thorn, caught in his bitterness and his rage, and a good woman willing to stay with him to the end.
Praise
“James Hall is a master of suspense.”
— The New York Times
“[A] first-rate thriller. . . Hall is at his electrifying best.” — People
“The kind of book you couldn’t put down if you tried!” — The Washington Times
Read The Whole Thorn Series
I wrestled for a long time with the problem of whether or not to give Thorn some kind of injury that paralyzed him…
James on Writing Red Sky at Night
An old college friend of mine from Atlanta suggested that I might be interested in writing about the new and extraordinary medical advances in the treatment of pain. The idea didn’t seize me until some months later when I spoke with my uncle who had suffered a spinal injury in a fall and was paralyzed. Almost immediately after his fall he began to experience phantom limb pain, that is, burning and cramping sensations in the legs that no longer had any feeling.
I asked my Atlanta doctor friend about phantom limb pain and he began to fill me in. Eventually I flew up to Atlanta and sat in on several consultations and rather exotic medical procedures that this doctor was performing on his suffering patients. It was an amazing and inspiring experience and gave me the motivation to go ahead with my attempt at a medical thriller.
I wrestled for a long time with the problem of whether or not to give Thorn some kind of injury that paralyzed him, or perhaps simply leave that to some other minor character. I finally decided to inflict a different kind of paralysis and pain on him.
My uncle was extremely helpful in giving me insight into the daily struggles of a paralysis victim. And I believe it was his help that gave whatever accuracy in my descriptions of the condition that the novel managed to create. On my last book tour, and again on the most recent one, I’ve had several people suffering various kinds of paralysis show up at my signings to let me know how much they appreciated the portrayal of their situation, and to say that putting my hero in a wheelchair, even for a short while, gave them something to cheer about.
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Keep in touch with Jim
We check in with Thorn over at Snappers or Lorelei every once in a while. Maybe he’ll have some new stories to tell us.
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