A brooding, moody novel as dark as its setting, Lost Girls is less a courtroom drama than a ghost story hinged on a thin plot. Crane is not a particularly likable or sympathetic character, and Pyper's attempts at creating atmosphere favor the "It was a dark and stormy night" school of genre writing. But fans of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and John Saul will find this a chilly enough read to occupy just that kind of evening. --Jane Adams

At the dawn of the new millennium, twenty-something dot-com millionaires Wallace and Bates travel to Brazil to market their breakthrough product, Hypothesys -- a "morality machine" designed to help people make the best decisions of their lives. But when they impulsively join an eco-tour deep into the Amazon rain forest, they may have sealed their own dire fates....In the dead of night, their boat is attacked, and Wallace and Bates are kidnapped along with their enigmatic female interpreter. Imprisoned and savagely tortured, they struggle to hold on to their humanity. But after Wallace engineers a violent escape, the survivors' own hidden dark natures begin to emerge -- posing a threat more lethal than either the jungle that surrounds them, or the merciless gunmen who pursue them.