Mysterious' reveal : Sleep Tight - Anne Frasier
Format: Mass Market Paperback, 375pp
Pub. Date: March 2003
Women who dye their hair blonde may think twice before heading to the salon after reading Frasier's enthralling thriller about a serial killer who plucks the eyes out of his young blonde victims and grafts rose stems onto their fingers-all in an effort to create the perfect woman.
Minneapolis FBI agent Mary Cantrell has a personal interest in the latest string of murders taking place in her hometown. The killer may very well be an old high school classmate named Gavin Hitchcock, who was convicted of raping and murdering her best friend and then released after serving nine years in prison.
Some vivid autopsy scenes may turn the stomachs of the squeamish, but there's a lot more to this clever intrigue than graphic police procedures.
Indeed, one of Frasier's many strengths is her ability create characters and relationships that are as compelling as the mystery itself. From the estranged Cantrell sisters and their broad-minded mother to Mary's handsome partner and the troubled Gavin, Frasier's well-rounded characters will linger with readers long after the killer is caught.
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The Body Box: A Cold Case Thriller
by Lynn Abercrombie
He calls it the Body Box. It's a space too small for his victims to sit up or lie down. But it's the perfect place to keep them for his games--the perfect place to watch them while they die. Bad choices and big mistakes have landed Detective Mechelle Deakes on the Atlanta Police Department's lowest rung, the Cold Case Unit. Sifting through forensic evidence and unsolved murder files is a thankless job she shares with her new partner, Lieutenant Hank Gooch, a man of few words and even fewer for African-American women cops like Mechelle. His single obsession is finding a serial killer who preys on the most innocent of victims, a man he thinks is responsible for many of the most gruesome unsolved cases in their files. And one chilling look convinces Mechelle that Hank's right. It's a case that has been cold for a reason. Someone wants it to stay closed. And two cops will risk everything--their jobs, their reputations, even their lives--to uncover the truth, no matter where it takes them.This first in a gripping new series introduces Mechelle Deakes, a hard-edged African-American detective assigned to Atlanta's Cold Case Unit, and her partner, Lieutenant Hank Gooch, who is determined to find a twisted serial killer no matter what the cost.
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meshe’s reveal
Headhunter by Michael Slade
A killer is stalking the rainy streets of Vancouver, taking the lives of young women and leaving their heads behind. Heads turn up everywhere -- floating downriver, buried in shallow graves, even nailed to the top of a totem pole on campus of the University of British Columbia. Among the victims are a young drug addict, a collegian, and a nun.
It's hysteria time. The RCMP launches a massive investigation, summoning up their crack detective, Robert LeClercq, to head a special investigation force. But as LeClercq tries to get inside the murderer's head, he realizes there is a diabolical depravity operating here that he cannot hope to understand.
The book winds and meanders its way from the Canadian Northwest to the jungles of Ecuador and back via New Orleans, and while the plot sometimes becomes so convoluted that it seems to be getting hopelessly entangled, it always gets back on track in time. This is a book for strong stomachs; there is some downright sickening stuff in here, but it doesn't overwhelm the narrative. And up to the very last page, the reader will never, ever, guess whodunit.
(there just might be a little extra thrown in with this one)
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The Distant Echo - Val McDermid
Amazon.co.uk Review
Val McDermid's The Distant Echo is, even more so than with her previous work, a masterpiece of trickery and misdirection. In 1978, four male students find the body of Rosie Duff half-buried in the snow and their lives are variously damaged by the suspicion that falls on them when the murder is never solved; a quarter of a century later, the case is reopened and suddenly the quartet start to be killed one after the other.
This is an effective thriller because it is so intelligent about the ways in which time changes things--secrets that seemed important become trivial and investigative techniques become ever more accurate. It is also intelligent about the ways in which things do not change--the friendships of the four men persist even when one becomes a fundamentalist preacher and another a post-modern literary theorist. Unusually for McDermid, this is a very Scots book as well--the investigating officers Maclennan and Lawson are very much men of a particular time and place. McDermid has a real sense of how to make forensic details count in a murder story--she also, more importantly, has a heart--this is a novel that makes us care passionately about victims and suspects alike.
Pyan's Book Reveal
Deviant Ways by Chris Mooney
Amazon Description
Punctuated with one blisteringly violent and unpredictable twist after another, this pitch-perfect study of psychological terror spotlights two magnificent minds opposed in a no-holds-barred duel of cunning and depravity.
A master killer calling himself the Sandman is out for revenge. He's slaughtering not just one person at a time but whole families and whole neighborhoods, unleashing devastating explosions nationwide, and watching the horror unfold on a sophisticated network of surveillance cameras. No one knows why he is committing his crimes, or where he'll strike next. But one man -- Jack Casey -- knows this: the Sandman wants him in the middle of the case, and wants him to suffer...
Jack was the FBI's top profiler until a psychopath's unspeakable crime shattered his life. Now Jack is starting over as a detective in a posh shoreline community outside Boston, and involved with a beautiful woman who knows nothing about his shocking past. But the Sandman has found him, and his cutting-edge electronic devices are silently monitoring Jack's every move. Knowing that a showdown is imminent, Jack turns in desperation to Malcolm Fletcher, a strange and brilliant fallen angel from the profiling unit. Fletcher is wanted by the FBI. And he possesses the key to unlocking the Sandman's demented mind.
As Jack Casey confronts evidence that the evil he's fighting may have emanated from his own side of the law, the Sandman's motivations begin to appear and a wild chase ensues. But while racing against time to save the next family, Jack is led deeper into the dark and terrifying tunnels of his fragile mind -- a place where the Sandman awaits, to deal his final master stroke of vindictive cruelty.
Deviant Ways is a breathtaking and unforgettable first novel that catapults Chris Mooney into suspense fiction's highest ranks. A harrowing journey through ordinary streets turned into scenes of unimaginable terror, it careens from cries of mass murder to whispers within the mind -- in a disturbing cat-and-mouse game of righteousness, loss, and vengeance.
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Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay
From Publishers Weekly
Dexter the Demon, Dexter the Avenger—whatever he chooses to call himself, the hero of this intelligent, darkly humorous series knows he's a monster who loves slicing people into little pieces. That Dexter limits his killing to "acceptable" victims—usually other serial killers—is designed to keep the reader from having to worry too much about the morality of his avocation. Dexter's just added his 40th victim, a homicidal pedophile, and is eagerly looking ahead to number 41 when he becomes involved in a case through his job as a blood spatter analyst at the Miami-Dade police forensics lab. A man is found with "everything on [his] body cut off, absolutely everything"—a piece of work that makes Dexter's own tidy killings look like child's play. This madman, nicknamed Danco, spends weeks surgically removing his victims' ears, lips, nose, arms, legs, etc., while keeping them alive to watch their own mutilation. Despite a certain professional admiration for Danco's dexterity, Dexter decides to take on the case. It's the contradictions in Dexter's character that make it all work—he's smart, he's funny, he cares for children, and yet he has no normal human responses or emotions. The first book in the series, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, was very well received; this one should be as well, and deservedly so.
NOTE: if the person who ends up with this book hasn't already read Darkly Dreaming Dexter, I'll include it as well.
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Bountiful's reveal is:
Caliban and Other Tales by Robert Devereaux
His mother was a sorceress, and his master is a powerful magician. His home is a dark, wild island of enchantment, spells...and evil. He is Caliban. Is he human, spirit or demon? Who can say? All he knows is that he burns with a lust for revenge and his growing powers may soon make it possible. But even he cannot predict the nightmarish shape his vengeance will take...or the tempest of terror it will unleash. Includes five never-before-collected stories!
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Danesnboxers' Reveal
Undone by Michael Kimball
Amazon.com
The thriller world's Maine man, Stephen King, calls this striking effort, set in the fictional Maine town of Gravity, "the sort of book you think about during the day and can't wait to settle back into at night." Kimball, who lives in York Harbor, just down the coast from King, combines Poe's The Premature Burial with James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, adds a jolt of sexual energy and a blast of betrayal, creates a cast of no less than a dozen fascinating characters and winds up with a book guaranteed to keep you touched and enthralled.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In the first scene of Kimball's electrifying new novel of psychological suspense, Bobby Swift is getting ready to be buried alive, part of an elaborate scheme to fake his own death so that he can keep $2 million from a defaulted loan and leave Gravity, Maine, for a life of leisure in the Cayman Islands. But Bobby meets a cruel fate when his wife and co-conspirator, Noel, fails to unearth him from the grave. After the third participant in the plan, an undertaker, is murdered, Bobby's best friend, Sal Erickson, is quickly drawn into the speculation and intrigue arising from the two deaths. Sal, a music teacher and recovering alcoholic, complicates his already problematic relationship with his wife, Iris, by falling off the wagon and pursuing a destructive affair with Noel, a seductive femme fatale who may be a victimized widow?or a clever murderess. Muddying the waters further are the schemes of Iris's brother Jerry, a shrewd redneck who plans to use incriminating evidence to blackmail Noel into an affair, and the conflict between the local constable and two government detectives assigned to the case. Kimball (Firewater Pond) skillfully juggles the murderous motives of varied suspects, all the while tightening the noose around Sal's neck as he begins to suspect that Noel is double-crossing him. The characters, briefly drawn but compelling, vivify the passions that lurk beneath the placid surface of a rural community and that, here, resolve dramatically in a keen-edged climax. 25,000 first printing.