num_pages: 438
description: When the body of a young female trainee is found brutally murdered in the Nurses' Station of the Western State Mental Hospital, Massachusetts, there is apparently no shortage of suspects - a whole hosptial of them. One inmate claims to have seen the killer, whom he will describe only as The Angel.Twenty years later, Francis Petrel, once a patient at the hospital, writes his account of the events of the murder and its investigation on the walls of his tiny apartment. As he writes he is visited by hallucinations, and by an increasing anxiety at his loosening grip on reality. As he goes deeper and deeper into his story about those events, his own madness returns. He remembers being co-opted into the investigation by Lucy Jones, a driven young profiler who has her own reason for pursuing this particular killer. But she and Francis face the same conundrum: how does one find a cold-blooded killer masquerading as mad in a world populated by the deranged?In the end it will come down to Francis. He is the only member of the investigating team capable of recognising the essential lie that The Angel embodies: for though his acts are those of a madman, he most emphatically is not...
language: English
title: The Mad Man's Tale
titlecomplete: The Mad Man's Tale
genres: Audiobook, Crime, Suspense, Novels, Thriller, Mystery Thriller, Psychological Thriller, Fiction, Horror, Mystery
ratings_count: 12090
awards: awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Anthony Award
category: Best Novel, awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Hammett Prize
publisher: Bantam Books