John Zarzynski

Alex Cannon is 14 years old in 1968 and will soon graduate from a poor Catholic school on Chicago's South Side. He is still coping with his mother's death three years earlier when during a recess basketball game at school, his life is saved by a scream from a new student which not only warns him of an imminent explosion on the school grounds but uses his secret name - a name only known to Alex and his late mother.

Thus begins his friendship with Jimmy O'Day; a boy possessed of an extraordinary gift of foresight but who believes he is cursed by his frequent and terrifying visions of death.

Jimmy's visions soon begin to focus on an overwhelming evil he calls The Dark Sun; a serial killer who is terrorizing the city. Along with his new friend Alex, he is sent to rural Wisconsin to spend the summer with his grandmother, Evelyn Driscoll. She is a powerful seer who for decades has controlled the chaos of her visions by confining them to her beloved "Doors and Windows"; a wondrous place that resembles an old hotel, except that its corridors seem endless. There is energy behind each door and if you are invited to unlock it, the window within will reveal a scene from the future.

From this secret place Jimmy and Alex will engage in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with the most brutal killer in Chicago history since Richard Speck.