One of Us Will Be Dead by Morning

Moody launches a saga in the world of his Haters series (Dog Blood) with this grim tale of endless disaster. A group of coworkers are more than ready to conclude team building exercises on the remote island of Skek, off the coast of England, and head home. Then they find a boat crashed on the rocks that’s full of dead and injured school children and their minders. It’s soon clear that someone is loose on the island, bent on murder. When the island’s owner arrives from the mainland, he reports that people dubbed Haters are erupting in mindless violence without warning. Cut off from help, short on resources, and high on paranoia, the two dwindling groups, who can’t even trust each other, must find a way off the island despite the promise of death waiting for them everywhere else. Moody covers the familiar ground of zombie thrillers, but these aren’t zombies: they’re living people who have an insatiable need to kill, uninhibited yet fully capable of forming thought. The tense narrative is relentless and gory, with more than a touch of nihilism. Readers who seek a glimmer of hope in their apocalypse may want to look elsewhere. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Literary. (Dec.)