Frank M. Robinson : Waiting

From the author who brought us the distinguished spy thriller Death of a Marionette and The Towering Inferno, one of the most popular films of the '70s, comes Waiting, an intense novel of contemporary menace, in the mode of Robinson's 1950s classic, The Power.

There are people living among us, who look just like normal human beings. They've been here for a long time--waiting. But they aren't exactly like us at all. Some of them can read minds, and in subtle ways take over what your are thinking, control you for a while.
They can make you love.
They can make you die.
One ordinary man in San Francisco, Arthur Banks, begins to find them out, and immediately his life and his family are in danger. It's a paranoid's worst nightmare. But that's just where it starts. He may well be fighting for the survival of the entire human race.

"I've always maintained that Frank M. Robinson's The Power was one of the best terror tales ever told. Waiting is even better, rich with character, suspense and constant surprise. This is one of the best chillers of the entire decade. It is guaranteed to give you nightmares. Reading this book was a pure pleasure."--Mystery Scene

Amazon.com Review
Veteran thriller writer Frank M. Robinson, who has been working in the genre since his 1950s classic The Power, approaches the millennium at full strength with a truly frightening and extremely plausible story. In Waiting, another race of human beings are about to take control of the earth. This alarming discovery was made by a Dr. Lawrence Shea--who must now pay a high price for his find. Shea is stalked on a journey to San Francisco by one of these "humans," and is then killed. From the very first step of this journey, Robinson grabs our attention with a combination of visceral and intellectual assaults.

Shea, we discover, was on his way to a meeting of the Suicide Club, a group of friends who gather regularly to discuss new developments in their particular area of expertise. Another club member, television journalist Artie Banks, begins to probe Shea's death and quickly finds it extremely suspicious--especially when more doctors involved in a routine autopsy are also killed. Other members of the club, as well as Artie's wife and disabled stepson, come under scrutiny. The horrible details of Robinson's alternate race of humans are gradually unveiled to Banks: