KILLING TIME

A while after his parents' divorce, Sam's father drags him away from good old New York City, where one can ignore the crazies and the blood and the screams on the corner, to live in a decrepit mountaintop cabin near Galeville (Pittsville, to Sam) in New England--where he finds himself the focus of a mysterious conspiracy. Sam's watch and his father's gourmet ""snarl grabber"" disappear, then reappear. The high school elite bombard Sam with powerful drugs. A cold ghost joins him in bed, a crazy girl makes midnight visits, a dead dog's blood is smeared on the cabin, and a missing teacher turns up headless in a pit in Sam's yard. In Windsor's hands all this is far more credible, involving, and snappy than it has a right to be. But then come the Druids: Dad's scholar friend Morgan says they were here thousands of years ago, and now Morgan and Dad are excited by the evidence that the mountaintop cabin was a Druid temple. The crazy girl, it turns out, is after Druid treasure; and in the end she nearly knifes Sam to death in her own weird ceremony--a sacrifice she hopes will bring forth the long-slumbering old ones--before a nick-of-time rescue. This climactic scene pretty much reduces the whole story to pulpy theatrics, but Sam's wry telling will carry you that far.