Joyce Carol Oates uses her award-winning talents to spin a masterful tale of Gothic horror for the second part of her mesmerizing trilogy. In The Devil's Half Acre, an eerie, supernatural setting and a host of eccentric characters combine to fill this spellbinding novel with tantalizing suspense. After more than a decade, the handsome amateur detective Xavier Kilgarvan has returned to Winterthurn just in time to see the fifth young woman's body carried from Devil's Half Acre. A brutal fiend has left her mutilated body in this desolate plot of land filled with hulking boulders, quicksand, and twisted trees. Can detective Kilgarvan discover the forces motivating the mysterious 'Gentleman Suitor' who has lured five innocent women to their deaths? To do so, he must confront demons from the past and the superstitions that surround the Devil's Half Acre.