THE MADMAN'S TALE is not meant to be read on the bus, in a doctor's waiting room, or places of similar hubbub. This is a narrative that demands your undivided attention without distraction. It commences with the interruption of Petrel's post-treatment existence by a voluntary, invitational return to the now-shuttered Western State Hospital. Petrel's day-to-day life is a simple one, consisting of walking the streets under the influence of a medicational regimen (the description of which, while short, is worth reading over and over) and residing in a small, income subsidized apartment, dependent upon the public dole, the kindness of strangers and the occasional charity of his sisters.

When a young female trainee is found brutally murdered in the Nurses' Station of the Western State Mental Hospital, Massachusetts, there is apparently no shortage of suspects - a whole hospital of them. One inmate claims to have seen the killer, whom hewill describe only as The Angel.

Twenty years later, Francis Petrel, once a patient at the hospital, writes his account of the events of the murder and its investigation on the walls of his tiny apartment. As he writes he is visited by hallucinations, and by an increasing anxiety at his loosening grip on reality. Ashe goes deeper and deeper into his story about those events, his own madness returns. He remembers being co-opted into the investigation by Lucy Jones, a driven young profiler who has her own reasons for pursuing this particular killer. But she and Francis face the same conundrum: how does one find a cold-blooded killer masquerading as mad in a world populated by the deranged?

In the end it will come down to Francis, for he is the only member of the investigating team capable of recognizing the essential lie that The Angel embodies: for though his acts are those of a madman, he most emphatically is not...