Smith, Martin Cruz - Nightwing

Guild Publishing
Hardback
254 pages
VG/G

In read, but well looked after condition. Slight lean on spine and some sun fading.

A group of people camp out in the desert under a cloudless sky. Suddenly a girl exclaims that the moon has disappeared, and minutes later a grotesque terror descends out of the night. Has it been called up by the old Hopi Indian, running coloured sands through his hand into an intricate painting? Black for death, red for blood. ‘I’m going to end the world’, he tells Youngman Duran, a bemused and cynical ex-convict the Hopis have made into a deputy sheriff. Youngman understands his rage at the humiliations inflicted on their people and the desecration of their land, but still he smiles when he asks ‘When?’ – ‘Today.’ Next morning the old medicine man is dead, bled to death where he lies in the centre of his painting. Every night from then on Death stirs. Its sound is a whisper, its wings are wide and gossamer, its teeth are sharp as knives, its appetite is insatiable. As a carrier of the most virulent insatiable. As a carrier of the most virulent of all diseases, this Death becomes a tide that threatens to sweep man away from the American Southwest. The burden of defeating this scourge falls on Youngman, who alone has understood the words of the painting, and on the obsessed scientist Hayden Paine, whose life is eaten up by its pursuit.