In the late summer of a long-ago year, a killer arrived in a small city. His name was Alton Turner Blackwood, and in the space of a few months he brutally murdered four families. His savage spree ended only when he himself was killed by the last survivor of the last family, a fourteen-year-old boy. Half a continent away and two decades later, someone is murdering families again, re-creating in detail Blackwood's crimes. Homicide detective John Calvino...

Odd Thomas, a short order cook at the Pico Mundo Grill, keeps his ability to speak with ghosts a secret from all but his girlfriend, Stormy, and the local police chief who he occasionally helps solve or prevent crime, but his unusual talent leads him and his fellow citizens into big trouble when a strange man comes to town followed by a horde of borachs--ghostly harbingers of mayhem.

Thomas Odd is a fry cook rumored to have the ability to talk to the dead. Odd is pulled inexorably to the sea, to a small California coastal town where nothing is as it seems. Now the forces arrayed against him have both official sanction and an infinitely more sinister authority ... and in this dark night of the soul dawn will come only after the most shattering revelations of all.

The woman astride the ghostly stallion reaches out desperately, the latest spirit to enlist the aid of Odd Thomas, the unassuming young fry cook whose gift--or curse--it is to see the shades of the restless dead, and to help them when he can.

Once the center of madness, suicide, mass murder, and whispers of things far worse, the 1800s Gilded Age palace known as the Pendleton, has been re-christened in the 1970s as a luxury apartment building. But now inexplicable shadows caper across walls, security cameras relay impossible images, phantom voices mutter in strange tongues, not-quite-human figures lurk in the basement, and elevators plunge into unknown depths.

Odd Thomas confronts deadly adversaries in a decaying estate.

"Two years after the cataclysmic events that sent him journeying into mystery, Odd Thomas, the intrepid fry cook who sees the dead and tries to help them, has traveled full circle, back to his beloved home town of Pico Mundo and the people he loves. He has come to save them--and perhaps humanity--from the full flowering of evil it is his destiny to confront, as he draws ever closer to the truth of the world and his place in it. Stronger, wiser than...

Odd Thomas confronts deadly adversaries in a decaying estate.