• Read a Review

• Read an Excerpt

A school bus carrying eight deaf school-girls and their teachers
brakes suddenly on a flat Kansas highway. They should never have
stopped. Waiting for them are three heartless men just escaped from
prison — each with nothing to lose. And now, with the girls
as their hostages, they have everything to gain. They make their
stand in an abandoned slaughterhouse, and it is there that Lou
Handy, a murderer and the convicts' ringleader, announces his
terms: to kill one captive an hour unless his demands are
met.

What follows is a twelve-hour siege of noose-tight tension —
and a war of nerves between Handy and the FBI's senior hostage
negotiator, Arthur Potter.

© Copyright 2003 Jeffery Deaver. All rights
reserved.