DREAMRAIDERS - Keady G L

Once they’re inside your head you can scream all you like but you won't get them out.

Sometimes circumstances of life and death can cause a person to enter a supernatural realm a place where angels fear to tread, a place inhabited by demonic Dream-raiders.

Flawed detective Bill Thackeray forms an unlikely alliance with a female detective to catch a cunning serial killer. It is a case no other cop wants or understands, a case where witchcraft, sacrifice and murder coalesce in the realm of the preternatural.

From Sydney's sun drenched suburbs to moonlit dark rituals practiced by a coven, from scorching fires of the tinder dry Blue Mountains to the darkest depths of the evil alternate reality of a Warlock's primal mind, this sexually charged tale of cops, covens and corpses takes the reader on an original, electrifying, horrifying and darkly-humorous psychic suspense ride.

A hard-nosed, hard-drinking Sydney police detective crosses swords with a satanic serial killer who specializes in murdering little boys. DI Bill 'Thacka' Thackeray has been chasing the shadowy Moloch for 6 years, since the first time he was forced to examine the severed penis of an unknown six-year old boy. Thacka thinks he knows who is responsible for the shocking crop of disembodied young genitalia but since he can't find the bodies, he can't prove it. Thacka knows he's in pursuit of evil but his police colleagues think he's a joke and his down to earth outlook cannot comprehend the extent of Moloch's designs, since they are beyond the bounds of any earthly understanding. The only ghosts Thacka knows about are the personal ones of his lost family who haunt his drunken nights. He'd never believed in anything but the reality of his police-trained senses, but the spirit of his dead son seems more and more real as the level in the bottle sinks. Thacka's failing career is salvaged by his new partner, DI Jess Parker, a straight cop with her own way of getting things done who against all odds, starts to believe in Thacka's phantom killer, and in Thacka the man.

Car accident victim Sarah Dixon is grieving her husband Wayne and praying for her little boy Russell, in a coma since the accident and given up for dead by the doctors.

Sarah is not the same since the crash that almost killed her too. She had always known she was psychic but is galvanised when she is able to enter the comatose mind of her six-year old son and bring him back. Thacka finds a bond with little Russell, and even more so with the beautiful Sarah, whose psychic abilities are flowering - not necessarily a good thing as her sharpening window into Moloch's evil universe looks both ways. Moloch's coven is penetrated by Steve, a blundering oversexed n'er do well desperate, to embark on a writing career to impress his wife Niki and save his failing marriage, but despite his feelings for her as she distances herself, the coven is not the only thing Steve wants to penetrate.

Just as Thacka has found enough cause to bring Moloch in for questioning, the warlock seemingly escapes justice in a flaming motorcycle crash. Moloch is dying while his coven prepares a satanic ritual to transfer his ancient spirit to a new human vessel. Despite his earlier scepticism, Thacka has now realised that Sarah's psychic abilities are real. He needs to know if Moloch is his serial killer, and there is only one way left to find out:  he has to ask Sarah to do something she has sworn never to attempt again - to enter the mind of a brain dead person to find the evidence of the murdered boys and to give Thacka closure. But doing that she will be risking her life in a fight against evil Dream-raiders.