After attorney Jay Clarke and his writing partners wrote the successful thriller Headhunter as "Michael Slade," he never looked back, giving up his law practice. A string of other thrillers followed, all written with a rotating team of partners, until eventually "Slade" encompassed Jay and his daughter Rebecca, who was clearly apprenticed to become a horror writer from a very early age.

Bed of Nails is the latest Slade collaboration from Jay and Rebecca Clarke, and it's a humdinger with ties close to home for many horror writers—a portion of the book is set at the World Horror Convention in Seattle a while back, and wrapped up in the ironic world of lawyers-turned-writers (ironic in part because of Jay Clarke's own career patterns, as well as those of so many others).

Besides sharing its title with an Alice Cooper song, this newest thriller is also the title of attorney Bret Lister's novel, which premieres at the WHC. His friend turned competitor Wes Grimmer, another attorney, has just published Halo of Flies, and both novels are based on a strange Tarot card-inspired case a year and a half earlier, a case worked on but unsolved by Zinc Chandler of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Special-X branch. But did one of the lawyers commit the original Hanged Man murder?

Complicating matters is the Ripper, a nutcase serial killer confined to a mental institution, and his hunger—literally, hunger—for revenge against Zinc, who put him there. The Ripper claims to have broken the time-space continuum and learned how to travel back and forth in time. In fact, he's currently "sharing" that other Ripper's crimes (Jack, late of Whitechapel, London, 1888). Now he's taught a disciple how to do it, too, and set in motion a series of events that will result in Zinc Chandler's death—and worse. For the Hanged Man murder is nothing but a baited hook for Zinc, and what happens at the World Horror con simply sets the hook. Before it's done, a trip to the South Pacific will invoke the islands' cannibal history in vivid, shocking detail, and the mountie Zinc Chandler will face his true foe, whoever he is.

Rife with fabulously gruesome historical cannibalism details, more than a hint of Tarot- and Goth-lore, a hefty dash of Lovecraft's Mythos, as well as subtle WHC in-jokes and insider name-drops, this newest Slade RCMP thriller manages to straddle both the big blockbuster thriller and small, quirky novel-of-terror camps. The disparate elements mesh better than one would expect, though one can occasionally glimpse a seam or zipper in the monster suit (but it's charming when you do). The book's genesis includes a WHC wager on the writing of a novel around the phrase "Ted Bundy's house," and that abode does indeed appear, a staked severed head posted in its front yard as if to announce a particularly specialized rummage sale. Other WHC "spooky Seattle" program tidbits appear, and several convention-goers meet their gory ends following up on them. The lines between the real and the fantastic, the historical and the hysterical, and the serious and the humorous end up continually blurred, and Slade's occasional tongue-in-cheek approach lightens what would otherwise be an exercise in grimness. This reporter has let his reading of Slade slide after Ghoul, but he'll enthusiastically seek to amend the situation—of that you can be sure. Highest possible recommendation, especially for the vividly rendered cannibalism facts, which by themselves are worth the price of the book.