Never Lifts a Finger

Description

He has never been within a hundred miles of a single killing. He just knows which lonely strangers online will do anything to feel chosen — and he points them at each other.

At 3 a.m., a college town’s worth of isolated, screen-lit people are getting attention from someone who seems to understand them completely. He flatters, he listens, he nudges. And then, very gently, he arranges for one of them to end another, each convinced it was their own idea.

Grad student Tobias Kerr starts pulling the thread after a classmate’s “random” death lines up too neatly with months of private messages from a friend nobody can find. The deeper Tobias digs, the more the kind stranger online seems to already know about him — his grief, his anger, the exact shape of the favor he’d be willing to do.

Bloodless on the surface and chilling underneath, this is horror about being maneuvered by someone who never has to get his hands dirty. Walton captures the blue glow and the bottomless want behind it. The scariest line in the book is I knew you’d understand.

Log on. He’s been waiting up for you.