In his four previous novels of suspense, Jonathan Nasaw gave readers a charming and unlikely hero against the forces of evil in former FBI agent E.L. Pender. Now, in The Boys from Santa Cruz, Pender faces his most terrifying foe to date. Like James Patterson and John Connolly, Jonathan Nasaw has proven time and again that he has an uncanny, almost eerie, knack for getting inside the labyrinthine and horrifying minds of the most deranged serial killers. In Fear Itself, Nasaw first introduced Pender, a rumpled, endearingly flawed investigator who immediately won readers’ hearts. In The Girls He Adored, Pender defeated a perverted psycho named Max, then went on to face The Machete Man in Twenty-Seven Bones, called a “skin-crawling, gory psycho-thriller” by the Scottish Daily Record. When last we left Pender, in Nasaw’s sexually charged thriller When She Was Bad, he took on a pair of mentally insane killers and nearly lost himself in the dark and blood-drenched recesses of their two twisted psyches.