Nameless Night » (Reprint)

G.M. Ford is the author of six widely praised Frank Corso novels, Fury, Black River, A Blind Eye, Red Tide, No Man's Land, and Blown Away, as well as six highly acclaimed mysteries featuring Seattle private investigator Leo Waterman. A former creative writing teacher in western Washington, Ford lives in Oregon and is currently working on his next novel.

The critically acclaimed and award-winning author of the Frank Corso and Leo Waterman series returns with a spellbinding novel of vanished lives and heinous betrayals that races, twists, and turns like a roller coaster running wild.

Discovered near death in a railroad car—his body broken, his mind destroyed—the man they call "Paul Hardy" has spent the past seven years living in a group home for disabled adults, mute, unresponsive, and eternally lost in a dull, gray haze.

But in the aftermath of a horrific car accident, he awakens in the hospital with a reconstructed face, a voice, and a mind clouded with memory. No longer Paul Hardy, he's someone even he himself cannot recognize. And he's got a purpose: to follow the confusing images in his brain to his lost past and identity. But his strange rebirth has attracted the dangerous attentions of powerful government men determined to keep a devastating secret buried forever.

And now he must run . . . or die.

Publishers Weekly

Ford, the author of the Frank Corso mysteries (Fury, etc.) and the Leo Waterman PI series (Cast in Stone, etc.), stumbles in his first stand-alone. Paul Hardy, who was found near death in a railroad car seven years earlier, has spent the time since in a home for the disabled in Washington State. During that time he has not spoken or responded to anything or anyone. Then one day, he rushes into the street to save a female patient in an out-of-control wheelchair. Run over by a car, he later awakens in the hospital with a new face. But the change is not merely cosmetic: he's someone entirely other, and he's sure his name is notPaul Hardy. Clinging to a barely remembered phrase, he sets out on a cross-country hunt to discover his real identity. Alas, after this promising setup, the novel sputters out in conventional-and predictable-melodrama, as Hardy finds himself at the center of a vast conspiracy hatched by people in high places who apparently want him dead. Ford fans will hope for a return to form with his next book. (Feb.)