STONE RIBS

There is a murderer loose in the suburbs of Kernsville, Maryland, but he isn’t targeting humans. He’s taking their pets, testing the limits of his cruelty, a pre-serial killer. When the authorities do nothing, a group of adolescents conspire to hunt him down.

Fourteen-year-old Maxwell Kern is a ghost at his school. Thin and awkward, he’s into computer hacking and fantasy miniatures, but inside, he churns with untold stories. His only friend, Billy Koenig, is the weirdest kid in town. He wears a khaki scouting uniform festooned with merit badges and knows everything about hunting and bushcraft.

The killer attacks a local animal shelter where Sadie Hopkins volunteers. Maxwell has a debilitating crush on this impossibly tall, effortlessly cool girl from school. Shattered by the massacre she witnessed, burning with a desire for justice, Sadie asks Maxwell to use his computer expertise to help find the killer. He agrees and recruits Billy. To impress Sadie, he rescues a huge, scarred pit bull mastiff from the shelter. Maxwell names the dog Stone Ribs, and they become constant companions. Their friendship echoes classic boy-and-his-dog stories, viewed through the fractured lens of a modern America that has lost all innocence.

The kids realize the murderer is closer than they thought. As a blizzard hammers Kernsville, they are thrust into a life-and-death struggle in the town's vast forests against an opponent on the brink of escalating from animals to human targets.

Stone Ribs, a riveting new novel of adolescent psychopathy by Thomas Zimmerman