The Midnight Knock

And Then There Were None meets The Twilight Zone in Fram’s inventive latest (after No Road Home). The action opens with a handsome man named Hunter wandering into an auto body shop in the moribund town of Ellersby, Tex., and demanding a job from shop owner Ethan. Six weeks later, the pair are headed for California, leaving behind “a corpse sprawled on a couch in the spare room upstairs and a string of fires burning in the engine bays.” After a diner patron advises the men against driving on Dust Road, claiming it can get “hungry” and trap desperate travelers, they’re forced to take it anyway, only to run out of gas near the Brake Inn Motel, where 12 people vanished 50 years earlier. There, Hunter and Ethan gradually meet seven other guests, including two friends rushing to the Mexican border and a woman and her grandfather fleeing a motorcycle-driving stranger. When people start dying and the guests realize they can’t leave, their individual predicaments converge into a supernatural locked-room nightmare. Fram keeps even savvy readers guessing about where he’s headed next and manages to flesh out each member of the book’s large cast. The result is wickedly satisfying. Agent: Melissa Danaczko, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (Oct.)