THE BURN PALACE is a book that any lover of mysteries/thrillers doesn’t want to miss. Several mysteries are going on at the same time, all in and around one small town

What happened to a newborn baby kidnapped from a hospital?

What is the significance of a snake in the baby’s place?

Why was a man scalped and who did it?

Why does the mother of the kidnapped baby hate him?

Why does this small town suddenly have a problem with cougers prowling the area and attacking humans?

Why are old people suddenly dying at a greater rate?

And more mysteries continue throughout. Stephen Dobyns skillfully brings them all together and solves each one.

However, be prepared for an overly long book. It could use more editing to eliminate a few redundancies. An even greater challenge to the reader is Dobyns’s use of SO MANY characters. I literally had to use a yellow highlighter to mark each new character name so I could leaf back a few pages when I needed a refresher of who was who.