Enigma of Twilight Falls

Martin Smith and John Becker are two best-selling authors with ordinary names and extraordinary minds. Rivals since childhood, they are natives of the northern California town of Twilight Falls and famous for their uncanny similarity in both physical manner and literary voice. When one of them ends up dead at the other’s home, an investigation is launched into their dark past, revealing a series of troubling stories from their childhood, adolescence, and careers.

A provocative painter named Max Higgins is on the verge of local fame. What is the secret to his work’s haunting allure? He collects photos of missing persons and incorporates them into his paintings, giving the faces, as he puts it, a “new home in his work”. This fascination stems from the bizarre disappearances of people he knew growing up, including his father. When someone recognizes a face in one of his paintings, he’s suddenly thrust into a journey as surreal as anything from his brush, a journey into his past that will irrevocably determine his future.

Meet Adrian Foster, a young and reclusive Los Angeles man with an extraordinary gift that has informally brought him the nickname “The Human Master Key”. When a new victim of a vicious serial killer turns up in the woods by Twilight Falls, California, Adrian reunites with eccentric detective Derek Adams in probing the occult lore surrounding the town—the town in which Adrian was born and raised, the town in which he left behind many a ghost, the town whose dark central spirit will force him on a harrowing journey through the rugged bottomlands of another’s psyche.