The Twisted Ones by Vin Packer, a pseudonym* for award-winning YA author Marijane Meaker (
Wikipedia) is a vintage pulp disaffected youth crime thriller, originally published by Gold Medal in 1959 and now reprinted and offered free courtesy of Adams Media's Prologue Books imprint.
This is of course another one of the books I paid for during that big Prologue 99 cent sale at Amazon a couple of weeks ago and not one of the umpteen dozen which didn't make the sale. Only 131 more to go and I'll have "free" ePub versions of everything I went and bought!
Prologue Books, from the looks of it, have now started in on their vintage pulp sci-fi/fantasy line, with reprints of E.E. Doc Smith and Robert Sheckley featured as new releases on the
official website. Hopefully they offer a couple of those free.
Anyway, free for the next week @
B&N and
Amazon UK (likely to drop in the
main store).
Description
These were nice kids, model kids. They didn’t wear leather jackets and roam the streets in “wolf packs”; they didn’t steal and mug for dope. For kids, they were well mannered and quiet. They were attractive and nicely dressed. You’d have welcomed them as next-door neighbors.
Yet...
one raped
one murdered
one killed by fire
What got into them? What dark thoughts tormented them when they were alone at night
* Speaking of pseudonyms, author Meaker turns out to have
an unfortunate tendency to give a 5-star customer review to her own work, and plug her related books when reviewing other authors' works on the same subject, and in the past sort of vaguely skirt around the fact that she is the actual author of the work she praises (or at least has this baffling tendency to talk about herself in the 3rd prerson), but hopefully she's learned better since 2005 as she more recently openly admits to having written the book she is 5-starring, which is progress for an octogenarian, I suppose.
Hopefully she has sufficient milliHarlanEllisons of talent to compensate for that, otherwise she's already gotten all the 20x$0.99 she's likely to get from my pocket and I'll just wait for future prospective freebies instead.