SOURCE: "The Return of the Blue Rose," in The New York Times, June 27, 1993, p. 24.

In the following favorable review, Wilson provides a plot summary of The Throat.

With The Throat, Peter Straub concludes a trilogy that began with the novel Koko and continued with Mystery. He deftly recapitulates the themes of the first two, then modulates them into that of this very impressive finale.

The police department of Millhaven, Ill., had closed the book on the Blue Rose murder case back in 1950 when a homicide detective named William Damrosch was found dead in his home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, having left a note with the words "Blue Rose" on the desk in front of him. Tim Underhill wrote a novel, "The Divided Man," about the case.

After that, Underhill now tells us, "I thought I was done with Damrosch, with Millhaven and with the Blue Rose murders...