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Terry Naughton, head of Orange County's Crimes Against Youth unit, is the champion of children. Someone calling themselves the Horridus has been abducting children from their beds, dressing them like little angels, and releasing them the next day, the only clue he leaves is a piece of snakeskin tucked into the folds of their gowns. So far he hasn't physically harmed any of them, but as Naughton well knows, it's only a matter of time. As he races to find the madman before his crimes escalate, Naughton learns that the Horridus may not be the only enemy. When shocking (and seemingly irrefutable) accusations put his career on the line, he is forced to confront his dark and violent past in his search for the truth. Who is behind the setup? And even if he can clear his name, can he do the same for his conscience? ** ### Amazon.com Review What novelist T. Jefferson Parker does so well in *Where Serpents Lie* (and in such previous high-octane outings as *Laguna Heat* and *Pacific Beat*) is to bind his characters tightly to the territory in which they live and die--the mostly scorched and urbanized but occasionally still pristine turf of Southern California's Orange County. When he's not running the Crimes Against Youth unit at the Orange County Sheriff's Department, Terry Naughton sits in a cave in Laguna Canyon, drinking tequila, smoking cigars, and trying to understand the twisted mind of a particularly vicious child molester called The Horridus. The serpents of the title are real, as is the terror Parker manages to evoke with the intense power of his writing. "I knew that there was no way that Lauren would ever have her childhood replaced with a better one," Naughton says about a 9- year-old girl sold for sex by her parents. "Lauren had the resigned eyes and the aura of passive invincibility found in nearly all children who have escaped to the last place they can go--to the private, silent cave of their own selves." ### From Library Journal In his sixth thriller (after The Triggerman's Dance, Hyperion, 1996), Parker returns to Orange County, California, where cop Terry Naughton, head of Crimes Against Youth, a division he helped create, is fiercely trying to track down a creepy pedophile who calls himself Horridus (as in Crotalus horridus, or timber rattlesnake) before he kills one of the young girls that he has kidnapped. It seems that besides child pornography and rape, Horridus is also into snakes?really big, hungry snakes?and there's evidence that he has used these "pets" to dispose of victims in the past. But Naughton's case is thrown into limbo when he's arrested for pedophilia after damning photographs show up in a police raid. Was he set up, or are the photos genuine, as the FBI claims they are? This taut police procedural mixes high suspense with believable characters; it's a real page-turner. Recommended for all fiction collections.?Rebecca House Stankowski, Purdue Univ. Calumet Lib., Hammond, Ind. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.