Dick Hill

The Moonpool / Nightwalkers Dick Hill

THE MOONPOOL
I remembered it from high school chemistry, one of those experiments where we made hydrogen. It was more of an acidic sensation on the palate than a real smell, but I recognized it. The pile of spent fuel at the bottom was beginning to outgas. Next would come the fire to end all fires....

A private detective working in Wilmington, North Carolina, is found dead in a gas-station restroom, apparently poisoned. But when her body sets off radiation alarms in the pathologist's office, suspicion falls on the nearby Helios nuclear power plant, a heavily guarded facility with supposedly fail-safe procedures.

As the FBI, local police, and the power plant's own security team investigate, ex-cop Cam Richter, head of the agency that employed the dead woman, begins his own inquiries. What was his detective investigating? And how could one person be poisoned by radiation without others being exposed?

Cam soon finds himself up against powerful forces that will stop at nothing to keep the plant's problems secret. The most vulnerable part of Helios is its "moonpool"--the radioactive storage pond that cools spent but volatile reactor fuel and must be kept completely full. Racing against time, Cam discovers an inside threat, a plan to use the plant's own systems to begin an unstoppable, disastrous sequence of events.

NIGHTWALKERS
Cam Richter, needing a break from his too eventful detective career, is in search of more peaceful pastures in the North Carolina countryside. He buys a seven hundred-acre antebellum plantation, the perfect location for restful solitude, but it doesn't take long for him to discover that his new locale is not as quiet as he'd hoped.

Almost immediately, Cam finds himself caught up in mischievous pranks around his land, the site of a Civil War-era massacre. When the pranks turn hostile, however, he realizes he's been targeted by a killer who holds him responsible for something Cam is pretty sure he never did. As he tries to find out why someone wants him dead, he begins to uncover the secrets of his plantation and how the land's tragic history is still tangled up in the present.

Cam will need all of his resources, including his redoubtable German shepherd companions, to stay alive as he deals with a determined stalker, some very eccentric people, and all the entanglements of a place suddenly alive with secrets and the fruits of a bloody past.