The story begins on a dark and cloudy night outside a Seattle nightclub. Nick Wilder and his brother Sam are walking to the car through a dimly lit parking lot, when they are attacked by a homeless man. Nick does his best to fend him off, but is easily overpowered, and knocked to the ground. His last sight before blacking out is the vagrant sinking a knife into Sam.

Nick wakes up half a mile from where he lost consciousness, beat up, bruised, bloody, and missing his shoes. He stumbles his way back to the club, anxious to see what happened to his brother. When he arrives, he sees a group of cops standing around an area cordoned off with yellow tape. Nick forces his way through, and comes face to face with his brother's corpse.

This is the opening salvo of Craig Larsen's debut novel, Mania. The book is a beautifully blended tapestry of past and present, reality and hallucination, and is so subtly done that sometimes it's impossible to tell which is which.

There are several things that I liked about the book. The narrative style is excellent. It's told in the third person, but it presents everything as if it were reality, until events prove that it was nothing more than a hallucination. We experience everything the way that Nick Wilder experiences it.

The other great part about the book was the way the plot twisted. Even the parts that were easy to predict didn't turn out exactly the way I expected.

This is not a short book, but I was hooked from the opening pages. I strongly recommend this for anyone looking for a good thriller.

Grade: 9/10