Sam Bayer is a bestselling author of thrillers. Frustrated with writer's block, he returns to his childhood home of Crane's View, New York, to write the story of a decades-old unsolved murder from his childhood.

It starts out like any other Jonathan Carroll novel, with artfully drawn, deeply involving characters. Any reader accustomed to Carroll's writing would expect that after fifty or so pages, some strange — possibly supernatural — events would occur, but in this case the magic realist twist never arrives. Kissing the Beehive turns out to be a straight murder-mystery-slash-character-study, focused on Sam Bayer and his outlandish lover, improbably named Veronica Lake. The whole affair holds together terrifically, twisting until the final page.

It's one of Carroll's better novels, which is saying a lot.