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= The Throat (Novel) = The Throat is a novel by by American author Peter Straub, and is the third installment in Straub's loosely connected "Blue Rose Trilogy". It follows Koko and Mystery. It was published in 1993 by Dutton. It won the 1993 Bram Stoker Award for "Best Novel."

Synopsis
The story is set in 1991, and begins with Tim Underhill getting a phone call from his old high school friend John Ransom, who tells him that his wife April is in a coma. She was beaten and left for dead in the St. Alwyn Hotel with a “Blue Rose” calling card, just like the second Blue Rose victim of 1950. Five days before April, an unidentified man was killed in an alley outside the hotel, also with a “Blue Rose” calling card, like the first victim of 1950. Ransom knows that Tim wrote a fictionalized account of the Blue Rose murders in a novel called The Divided Man, in which Tim followed the official line that the police detective in charge of the Blue Rose investigation, William Damrosch (called Hal Esterhaz in Tim’s novel), was the Blue Rose killer. But even though Damrosch’s suicide note implied his guilt, Tim never really trusted it, and he later learned that it was Glendenning Upshaw who framed Damrosch and engineered his suicide. (Upshaw was responsible for the attack on the fake Blue Rose victim, Doctor Laing, which is the story of Mystery.) Tim and Ransom begin working on solving the original and present Blue Rose murders. Tim spots a man following Ransom on their way to visit April in the hospital. The next day, April is murdered in her hospital bed. A serial killer named Walter Dragonette, who calls himself the the “Meat Man”, is arrested by the police. He claims to be the Blue Rose killer, but it becomes obvious that he’s not. The next week, the first Blue Rose victim is identified at the morgue as Grant Hoffman, a student at the college where Ransom teaches. The Blue Rose killer seems to have a vendetta against John Ransom.

On the other hand, Tim learns that April had been working on a history project about one of the Millhaven bridges, and he spots the man who was following Ransom parked outside an old taproom near the bridge. He and Ransom break into the taproom, and find a torture chair in the cellar, along with fragments of a note that says, “Jane Wright, Alle-to-n, 1977”. They think this cellar could be a torture playground for the Blue Rose killer, and that Jane Wright was one of his victims. Tim wonders if April was killed because her history project led her too close to the Blue Rose killer’s hideout. On this reasoning, the killer would have nothing particular against John Ransom, and the murder of Grant Hoffman is mysterious.

Tim and Ransom learn that the day manager of the St. Alwyn Hotel, Bob Bandolier, was the original Blue Rose killer: a Nazi of the private life who beat his wife, and who killed victims inside or near the hotel in order to “pay back” the St. Alwyn for firing him. They also learn that Bob had a son named Fee, who was sent away to live with relatives in Tangent Ohio, about a year after the murders, when he was seven or eight years old. Fee went straight into the military after high school in 1961, but his relatives say that he must have changed his name, because no one could track him down after that. After nights of detective work with Tom Pasmore, Tim realizes that Fee must have returned to Millhaven in 1979 and acquired his father’s old house, vacated since Bob died in 1972. Reason being, the Bandolier house has been owned by a fake company since ’79, and the front man for this company, William Writzmann, is the man who was following John Ransom to the hospital, and who was parked outside the abandoned taproom where Tim and Ransom later found the torture cellar. It turns out this fake company owns the taproom too. Tim concludes that Fee Bandolier is the new Blue Rose killer, following in his father’s footsteps, and that Writzmann works for him somehow. Soon after that, Tim realizes that Fee must be a Millhaven homicide detective, when he learns that one of the listed officers of Fee’s fake company is a bogus name referring to the head of the Millhaven homicide unit back in the ’70s, a name that only a cop would know. Soon after this realization, William Writzmann is found dead near a tavern close to the St. Alwyn, with a “Blue Rose” calling card, just like the third Blue Rose victim of 1950. Tim deduces that Fee killed his own thug because Tim and Ransom were getting too close to him.

Tim and Ransom begin to suspect that Paul Fontaine, the detective in charge of the Blue Rose case, is Fee, since he keeps insisting that Tim stop meddling in the Blue Rose affair and go back home to New York. Tom Pasmore agrees with Tim that Fontaine is probably Fee. He also deduces that Fee Bandolier is Franklin Bachelor, a figure we have seen in flashbacks at many points in the novel. Bachelor was a Green Beret feared by every soldier on earth, and a full-blown psychopath who engaged in rites of murder and cannibalism. John Ransom was a captain in Vietnam at the same time, and in 1964 he was sent to retrieve Bachelor out of the field and bring him in to his superiors for questioning. Bachelor evaded Ransom and tricked him into capturing his subordinate instead. Later, during the 1968 Tet Offensive, Bachelor went full rogue and betrayed his country by waging a personal war on Captain Ransom, tipping off the Vietcong who attacked Ransom’s camp and killed everyone except Ransom, who barely escaped. Tim likes Pasmore’s theory that Fee Bandolier is Franklin Bachelor. The initials F.B. are promising, and the Vietnam connection is off the scales: Bachelor was a psychopath like Blue Rose and was Ransom’s enemy — a clear motive for killing people like Hoffman and April who are connected to Ransom. Tim already learned that Fee changed his name after he graduated from high school in Tangent Ohio and enlisted in the army, and so he flies out to Tangent to visit a retired colonel and ask him if a Franklin Bachelor is listed in the 1961 records. They find Bachelor listed, and the colonel says he even remembers what he looked like. Tim shows him a photograph of a group of Millhaven police detectives, and the colonel positively identifies Paul Fontaine as Bachelor.

Now fully convinced that Detective Paul Fontaine is Fee Bandolier (the son of the original Blue Rose killer), who changed his name to Franklin Bachelor (the psychopathic Green Beret), who has every reason to hate John Ransom, Tim returns to Millhaven, and he and Ransom plan to bring down Fontaine. They find him late at night at the Bandolier home, and confront him. John’s father-in-law (April’s father) is with them, and he shoots Fontaine, killing him. Tim tells the police that Fontaine was the Blue Rose killer, but the police cover everything up to preserve their reputation.

Tim returns to New York but is contacted two weeks later by Tom Pasmore, who tells him they made a grievous error. Paul Fontaine could not have been the Blue Rose killer. One of Fee’s victims, the “Jane Wright of Alle-to-n in 1977” found in the taproom owned by Fee’s fake company, turns out to be Jane Wright of Allerton Ohio, murdered in 1977; Paul Fontaine was a detective in another state at that time. Tim flies back to Millhaven, and he and Pasmore set a trap for the real killer. He turns out to be Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan, Fontaine’s superior, and widely admired by Millhaven’s citizens. They lure Hogan into an old theater, where Tim kills him. Later that morning, Tim contacts news reporters to be sure there is no police cover-up this time. Finally, he goes to John Ransom, and tells him they were wrong about Fontaine; Fee Bandolier was Mike Hogan. Then comes the outrageous twist: Tim accuses Ransom of killing his wife. Hogan murdered only the third Blue Rose victim (Writzmann, his own thug); the first two victims (Grant Hoffman and April Ransom) were killed by none other than John Ransom himself.