There’s a curse on the Kuckuck building.
It’s been abandoned for more than a decade. It’s boarded up, falling apart and slated for demolition. In other words, it’s a magnet for kids to break, enter, climb the stairs and explore. Which is exactly what Riley Hawkins, grade-school bully, decides to do …
… Until the building strikes back!
Before Riley can go upstairs, he’s plunged into an abyss, reliving his most horrifying nightmare. When he staggers free from the grip of despair and death, he knows that he has stumbled upon the most fearsome secret in the village of Hercules, Wisconsin. Suddenly, Riley has a weapon he can use to wreak his revenge on the world torment the other kids in town.
Riley begins a campaign of terror that can’t help but draw the attention of Police Chief Jim Otis. Ushered by Riley into the “cursed” building, Otis faces the worst memory and most frightening moment of his life. It becomes his job to pierce the dark secret of the building.
Was it the Kuckuck sisters who, before they died, cast the spell? Maybe it was the Ho-Chunk crone, embittered by the treatment of her people, who was trapped alone upstairs until she died.
What about Pyramid Purlew, the building’s last tenant, a macabre and shadowy character obsessed with the death rituals of ancient Egypt, who disappeared from Hercules and left behind four jars whose contents are too awful to examine?
To solve the mystery of the Kuckuck building, Jim Otis leans on his friends and deputies, a Ho-Chunk shaman, a deer butcher named Orlo, an Egyptologist from the university and, of course, his feisty and resourceful daughter, Natalie …
… not to mention Tatum, the dog in the story.
All of which begs the biggest question of all:
Is Jim gonna marry Carol, or not?
David Benjamin began his career as a storyteller in Mrs. Poss’ second-grade class at St. Mary’s School in Tomah, Wisconsin. His fictional memoir, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, originally published by Random House, was reprinted by Last Kid Books in 2019. His Last Kid Books include a collection of his essays, Almost Killed by a Train of Thought, two short story anthologies, The Melting Grandmother and Other Short Works and Christmas in a Jugular Vein and sixteen novels, Three’s a Crowd, A Sunday Kind of Love, Summer of ’68, Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter, Black Dragon, They Shot Kennedy, Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love, Witness to the Crucifixion, Choose Moose, Bistro Nights, The Voice of the Dog and Benjamin’s Jim Otis mystery series, Jailbait, Bastard’s Bluff, Woman Trouble, Dead Shot and Cheat. As a journalist, Benjamin has edited newspapers, published and edited several magazines, and authored SUMO: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Japan’s National Sport.
Since its launch in 2019, Benjamin’s publishing imprint, Last Kid Books, has won more than forty independent-press awards. These include, for They Shot Kennedy, the Midwest Book Awards’ 2021 grand prize for literary/historical/contemporary fiction, and a 2022 Silver Medal for Humor to Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love in the Independent Book Publishers Association’s prestigious Benjamin Franklin Awards.
Benjamin and his wife, Junko Yoshida, have been married for ages. They live sometimes in Madison, Wis., and the rest of the time in Paris.
