The Snake Patch

by Jeff Rice

On a summer night in 1963, four pre-teen boys are talking baseball and girls in their sanctuary, a tree house in the middle of a vacant lot called the "snake patch." Their idyllic bull session turns to horror when a teen-age sexual predator rapes his girlfriend under the tree house, unaware the four boys are watching. When the girl later kills herself, the boys – one of whom is the son of the police officer assigned to investigate the case – struggle to reconcile the rape-suicide with their own burgeoning sexualities. As the boys contend with these coming-of-age experiences, their lives are overshadowed by the criminal case that is developing around them, and the power struggles among the adults who must protect them and still use their testimony to prosecute the rapist. Along the way, childhood concepts of ethics, heroism and justice are challenged and, eventually, redefined

282 pages, Paperback

Published March 10, 2018

About the author

Jeffrey Grant Rice was born in Providence, Rhode Island, USA in 1944. He spent his early childhood in Beverly Hills. He has been a Las Vegas resident since 1955.

Jeff Rice is best known as the author of The Kolchak Papers, a novel he finished on October 31, 1970. Rice’s novel was still unpublished when it was optioned for television and adapted for a TV audience as The Night Stalker. It subsequently had a brief print run when the Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV series grew in popularity. In 2007 Moonstone Books released a new edition which also includes the sequel, The Night Strangler.