From Scottish writer William Meikle comes a novel that is a welcome return to those tomes of pure enjoyment that we read with guilt in our early teens, in the tradition of James Herbert's THE RATS and Guy N. Smith's NIGHT OF THE CRABS. It begins with a dead whale on a Boston shoreline--not in itself an unusual occurrence. But the things that claw their way out of the blubber are very unusual indeed. A cast of giant crabs, evolved over centuries, descends on a small coastal town and, having feasted, make their way to the city using the sewer system. Soon they are swarming around Manhattan, hunted and harried by a SWAT team tasked with ridding the city of the menace...before the menace gets big enough to rid itself of the city.