In this nail-biting sequel to his popular Thunder Rise trilogy (Thunder Rise, Asylum, Summer Place), G. Wayne Miller breathes unnerving new life into the time-honored zombie story. An idyllic New England town panics as national media cover what seems to be a serial killer or satanic cult with echoes of Charles Manson. With a twist: this killer kills with drowning.

In reality, something worse that a cult is loose: Sully, a murdered outcast brought back to life one drug-crazed night in a cemetery by Joel White, a quirky college student who has been initiated into the rites of the dark Haitian bocor priesthood. As the killings continue and the police, FBI and National Guard are stymied, Joel enlists the help of Pierre Antoine, a Haitian houngan, or good voodoo priest, to stop Sully – who, moving methodically down the list of people who wronged him in life, has taken aim at Joel, his boyhood pal, and his girlfriend.

Part horror, part mystery, and told with a distinctive style and strong sense of character and place, Drowned climaxes on the Fourth of July, when police finally have made an arrest and a relieved public is eager for summer fun. But the authorities have the wrong man — and Sully, who not even bullets can stop, remains intent on revenge. Only Pierre Antoine, with the help of Native American Charlie Moonlight, the hero of Thunder Rise, has any chance of stopping The Evil — “the source of all suffering, of all human sickness and misery and pain,” as the good Haitian priest describes the darkest of dark forces that zombie Sully is channeling.