Special Agent Daniel Stansfield is done with the FBI; at least he thinks he is. After packing up his home in Utah, he plans to serve one last tour in the military reserves, hopefully die, and never have to deal with the crushing weight of a failed marriage and the death of two sets of parents ever again. As a child, Daniel was witness to the brutal mother of his mother in a hotel room at the hands of his father. Her love of John Denver and the book The Shining have followed Daniel everywhere to the point that he keeps the radio off and his life in as much silence as possible. As an adult, his adoptive parents were killed in a sudden car accident, leaving him a home he’s left abandoned for four years. All his best laid plans to bow out of this life with no fuss are brutally kicked aside when his former FBI branch in Denver tells him that the murders that perplexed him years before have started all over again.
A bit of a trigger warning, this is where things get brutal so skip if you have a weak stomach or aren’t interested in violence at the moment.
People are waking up walking along the side of the highway with no memory of how they’ve appeared there. They are far from home, each with a strand of hair wrapped around their tongue. The most chilling part is that they are naked, save for being draped with the flayed skin of another human being they’ve never met before. Security cameras and phones glitch out to the point where no tracking data is available for any of the locations. Known as “Drifters,” multiple chat rooms and podcasts have popped up with hope of exploring the phenomena. Dan is uncomfortably psychic and wants nothing to do with the reemergence of these murders after years of silence, but the phenomena won’t leave him alone. While having dinner with his ex-wife, another agent, one of the Drifters enters wearing the skin of a woman. Daniel has no choice but to return to investigating, including finding a woman alive next to a flayed body in the same hotel where he watched his mother die.
There is nothing straightforward about Headlights, which was an absolute treat for me. What starts as a murder mystery quickly turns into a book of High Strangeness and unexplained phenomena. From places that sound a lot like Skinwalker Ranch to murders that would make Hannibal Lecter grin, Headlights dares you to try and figure out the secret of what is stalking Daniel from page one. CJ Leede is rapidly becoming an instant buy author for me. Leede’s books Maeve Fly and American Rapture have lodged themselves into my brain and now made a little space for Headlights to make a home. Leede excels in creating worlds where the reader is constantly wondering if the threat is tangible, supernatural, or a strange combination of the two. The book is full of references to Stephen King, High Strangeness, and the beloved FBI crime thriller.
Headlights is now available from Tor Books.
