A Sniper in the Woods - and a Town Under Siege. The 48-Day Manhunt That Terrorized America.
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.
About Author Howard Frank
Howard Frank is an award-winning journalist, a senior content writer and a native New Yorker. Howard transitioned from a successful career in the fashion industry to spend over a decade as a frontline reporter, eventually bringing his investigative rigor to the world of high-level scientific instrumentation.
A dedicated mental health advocate and true crime author, Frank specializes in the shadowed architecture of the criminal psyche. He is the author of two gripping works that explore the extremes of human experience: TALK TO THE DEVIL - A raw, tear-stained memoir of surviving severe clinical depression, hailed for its unflinching honesty and its role in breaking the silence surrounding mental illness, and CHAMELEON: A chilling, meticulously researched account of a double murder in the Poconos, praised for its deep-dive into the fractured mind of killer Michael John Parrish.
From the precision of the laboratory to the dark corners of the forensic world, Frank remains a singular voice in the study of the human condition.
