Blue Rose Trilogy

About the Blue Rose Trilogy series

The Blue Rose Trilogy is Peter Straub's loosely connected sequence of literary horror-mysteries, named for the words a killer leaves scrawled at each of his crime scenes in the shared fictional town of Millhaven, Illinois. Koko (1988), which won the World Fantasy Award, follows four Vietnam veterans reunited by the discovery that a wartime atrocity they buried may be resurfacing as a string of murders across Asia, each signed with the name "Koko." Mystery (1990) shifts focus to Tom Pasmore, a young boy who survives a near-fatal accident and becomes fixated on solving murders under the tutelage of an aging detective -- a fixation that leads him toward the Blue Rose killings that haunted Millhaven decades earlier. The Throat (1993) draws the trilogy together: novelist Tim Underhill returns to Millhaven at an old army friend's request to investigate what looks like a copycat of the original Blue Rose murders, and enlists the now-adult Tom Pasmore to help him.

The three books share settings, recurring characters and a slowly-assembled central mystery, but each was written to work as its own novel first -- Straub called the connections between them a way of building a larger fictional world rather than a conventional continuing series. Straub won the Bram Stoker Award for Mystery, and the trilogy is generally regarded as the high point of his literary horror-mystery hybrid style, extending the metafictional, unreliable-narrator techniques he'd developed in earlier novels like Ghost Story and Shadowland.