The quiet New England village of Grindle was the last place in the world where murder might be expected. Vultures, traditional heralds of death in the valley, had not roosted in Grindle Oak for more than a hundred years. But now they swarmed there, sinister omens of death to follow. For a murderer stalked the woods and fields of Grindle, a creature whose twisted mind took fiendish joy in killing. And soon the signs began to appear--a dead monkey, savagely eviscerated ... the mutilated body of a kitten... And then a man, drifting face down in the shallow waters of a pond, a man who had been killed slowly by dragging his body behind a moving car...