Lying In Wait

A Silent Forest. A Sniper's Bullet. A Community Held Hostage.

On the night of September 12, 2014, the autumnal quiet of the Pocono Mountains was shattered by the crack of a .308-caliber rifle. At the Pennsylvania State Police barracks in Blooming Grove, Corporal Bryon Dickson and Trooper Alex Douglass fell, victims of a calculated ambush launched from the darkness of the treeline.

The shooter was not a phantom, but a neighbor: Eric Matthew Frein, a survivalist and military reenactor who had spent years preparing for a private war against the state. As Frein vanished into the dense, unforgiving woodlands he knew intimately, he sparked one of the largest and most expensive manhunts in American history. It also landed him on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.

LYING IN WAIT takes readers deep inside the forty-eight-day siege that transformed a peaceful region into a "Green Hell" of fear and paranoia. From the terrified silence of lockdown to the high-tech war room of the pursuit, Howard Frank reconstructs the harrowing search for a "mission-oriented killer" who viewed murder as an art form.

Drawing on forensic reports, court transcripts, interviews with key players, and the killer's own chilling journals, this is the definitive account of a domestic terrorist who mistook his own delusions for revolution, and the relentless machinery of justice that rose to meet him.