Bullied as a child for being overweight and an orphan, the serial killer in I Disappeared Them hides in plain sight. By day, he is an affable family man with a disarming smile, surrounded by his children and loving wife. At night, he punches the clock as a hardworking pizza man. After work, he roams Miami’s nighttime streets as the Periwinkle Killer, a sociopath passing judgment on the wicked according to a twisted moral code. He believes himself to be a defender of women and children. The Everglades is filling up with the corpses of his victims. He must be stopped, but there are no clues except the periwinkles he leaves at every crime scene.

I Disappeared Them is a brutal boy-meets-girl love story that delves into the Periwinkle Killer’s childhood to confront the age-old question: is a serial killer designed or destined? Like Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie, Preston L. Allen’s immersive narrative hauntingly occupies the peculiar psychological landscape of a murderer.

“What if you’re a good person—kind, sensitive, funny—but evil won’t let you be? I Disappeared Them is the story of a good man tormented, fervently wrestling right and wrong, life and murder. His battle against the demons of a secret mental chaos is a contest he can’t win, and yet we can’t help but enjoy the fight, every round, blood seeping out like love to its masterful end. What I mean is that Preston L. Allen kills so good, you’ve never seen such desperate beauty in the grisly, lovely, fleshy pages of murder that is as groundbreaking as it is gloriously literary.”—Anjanette Delgado, author of The Heartbreak Pill