Innocents Lost Excerpt

As we’re down to your final copies of Innocents Lost by Michael McBride, I wanted to release an excerpt from this novel.  There’s been quite the buzz about McBride’s latest.  Check out what Horror Mall customers have been saying:

Posted by JASON PHILLIPS

I got to page 80 and put this book down twice. Why? Well it’s not because it was rubbish! In fact it is a great story that smacks you hard. This was very hard to read as a parent with children involved but Michael keeps you reading.

You follow two main characters who meet up in the book, one trying to find his daughter the other trying to find the person who took his daughter. This is a very clever book with a good twist.

This is a must for any McBride fan, hell it’s a must for any horror fan!

Posted by William C. Rasmussen

I simply do not understand why this book is not a sellout!? Innocents Lost by Michael McBride is an unbelievable tale! It’s a short novel that combines gut- and heart-wrenching scenes, a furious pace, and a dazzlingly clever, twisty plot! McBride’s story of gruesome child abductions perpetrated by a cold-blooded, relentless serial killer is quite simply a superb tale! It gets my highest recommendation!!

Posted by Geoff Guthrie

Innocent’s Lost is a story about child abduction, and at the beginning of the story an FBI agent who works on child abduction gets his little girl abducted on her birthday. The agent, Phil Preston, then falls apart and devotes every resource to find this child abductor in hopes of finding his little girl alive.

McBride weaves an interesting tale here; we have the child abductions, but we also have a mystery with a Native American Medicine Wheel and why does this relate to the story, and also why is this child abductor doing what he is doing, is there a story behind this? So it’s not a simple story. McBride weaves the tale into a mystery where Preston is putting together the pieces trying to figure out how to capture this child abductor. Also there are multiple twists to the story as well, and it’ll have you thinking.

This is an engaging horror story that runs like a thriller and keeps you turning the pages to find out what’s next. The story is not as bleak as one would think when it comes to child abduction because there are other parts to the story like the Medicine Wheel that keep you in wonder and interest. This was a solid novel by McBride, I enjoyed reading it, and I highly recommend it!

Innocents Lost–Excerpt From The Novel

22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

Fremont County Sheriff Keith Dandridge surveyed the site from the edge of the forest. The scene before him was beyond his worst nightmares. In his eleven years in law enforcement, he had been involved in some of the most ghastly cases in the Rocky Mountain region, most notably the Schoolhouse Slaughter in Pine Springs eight years ago. A disgruntled, bipolar teacher named Irving Jepperson had lined up his class of twelve sixth grade students at the front of the room and fired upon them at close range with a shotgun. Four of the children had managed to escape through the window while the custodian and another teacher subdued him. Eight eleven and twelve year-olds had been heaped on the floor at the foot of a chalkboard peppered with buckshot and spattered with blood, bone fragments, and gray matter when he arrived. There had been nothing left of their faces or upper torsos, leaving the parents to identify their children by their blood-soaked clothing and shoes. And somehow, even that carnage paled by comparison to the horror that unfolded before him now, perhaps not in sheer ferocity, but in the palpable evil that emanated from the clearing.

The amount of planning that had been invested into the creation of this tableau was staggering.

A ring of halogen lights encircled the wagon wheel design. They provided precious little illumination, and instead cast long shadows from the rock cairns and walls. More lights would have to be airlifted in with a supply of portable generators, but not until they had thoroughly scoured the ground for evidence. They couldn’t afford for the rotors of a chopper to blow away even a single footprint, and the nearest other suitable landing area was a mile and a half to the northeast. For now, the ERT crew was gathering whatever they could find and photographing even the smallest stone from every appreciable angle.

With such an elaborate setup, Dandridge knew they would only discover what the killer wanted them to find. This was no haphazard burial site. An inordinate amount of time and care had gone into designing something meant to be seen.

This promised to be the longest night of his life.

“You’re going to want to see this,” an evidence tech he recognized as Brad Stewart said from his left, where two large piles of stones had been removed from one of the cairns and stacked to either side of it, framing a maw of shadows.

Dandridge reluctantly approached, accepted the proffered flashlight from Stewart, and shined it into the hollow base of the cairn.

“At a guess,” Stewart said, “I’d wager she was killed roughly two years ago, but we’ll have to wait for the ME for a more official assessment.”

“She?”

“That’s our working assumption. She’s still too young and skeletally immature to tell definitively.”

Dandridge crouched and had to cover the lower portion of his face with his handkerchief to combat the stench.

A handful of flies buzzed lazily at the periphery of the light’s reach.

“For the love of God,” Deputy Miller said from behind him. There was a crashing sound in the underbrush, then a retching noise as Miller was absolved of his dinner.

Dandridge studied the recess with the flashlight. A fully-articulated skeleton had been posed to face the center of the medicine wheel. Its palms had been drawn together and placed against the left side of its skull, its head canted slightly toward them in a twisted mockery of a peacefully sleeping child. There was a depressed fracture slightly anterior to the coronal suture, from which a spider web of cracks expanded. And based upon the size of the bones and the presence of the epiphyseal growth plate lines, he estimated she couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. Rusted lengths of barbed wire had been wound around and through the skeleton to hold the remains in place. Tangles of hair and tattered skin still adorned the barbs. Clumps of blackened flesh clung to the bones at random intervals, while the rest had turned the color of rust and were crusted with flaking scales of dried blood. Frayed tendons had retracted and pulled away from their moorings, where the gristle of muscle attachments reminded him of the nubs at the ends of gnawed drumsticks. The cartilaginous joints were ebon and rotted, yet somehow managed to hold the appendages together. Flies crawled on the dirt, which was slimy and lumpy with the foul dissolution of the tissues that had sloughed from the body as it decomposed.

“All of the teeth are still intact,” Dandridge said, sweeping the beam across the small face. “It shouldn’t take long to provide a positive ID from dental records.”

“If we’re right, it might be even easier than that,” Stewart said. “We were waiting for you before we watched the disks. There are tins buried halfway between the central and outer cairns, just like the professor said. We’re still carefully digging them out of the ground. So far, the samples we’ve loaded all confirm the presence of a video file in the neighborhood of half a gigabyte.”

“How long is that?”

“Depending upon resolution, somewhere between twenty and forty minutes.”

“And you haven’t watched them yet?”

“We took samples of the blood smears and dusted for prints, but no, we saved that honor just for you.”

Dandridge glanced at the remains one final time. He only hoped she hadn’t suffered too badly. His gut, however, insisted otherwise.

“We have the disk that corresponds with this cairn loaded and waiting on a laptop,” Stewart said. He paused. “Are you ready to do this?”

Dandridge nodded and rose to his feet. The last thing in the world he wanted to do right now was watch that infernal disk. He already had a pretty good idea of what it contained.

Stewart nodded toward the nearest overhead light, which had been mounted in the upper reaches of one of those sickly pines. An evidence tech he hadn’t worked with before sat on a level portion of the twisted trunk, computer in his lap, a stack of tins in plastic evidence bags to his right. He looked up when Dandridge approached, quickly stood, and handed over the laptop. Dandridge sat on the tech’s former perch and the others gathered around to watch. The tech offered one of the bagged tins from the pile, upon which several numbers and letters had been scratched.

“We suspect the top number is the victim’s chronological order,” the tech said. “The numbers below it are the month and day. No year. And there’s still some debate, but I’m pretty sure the letters on the bottom line are abbreviations for vernal and autumnal equinox, and summer and winter solstice.”

“How do I make this thing play?” Dandridge asked.

“It’s already primed. You just have to double-click the file name.”

Ordinarily, this was where the tech would not-so-discreetly mock his inferior technical skills, but tonight, no one envied him the task at hand.

Dandridge did as he was instructed and the media player opened. After a moment, a gray rectangle with a control bar beneath it appeared.

He drew a deep breath to steady his nerves, aligned the cursor with the PLAY button, and tapped the mouse.

The video began to roll.

PURCHASE ONE OF THE REMAINING COPIES