The Angel Maker (Boldt / Matthews) [Kindle Edition]

Ridley Pearson (Author)

Book Description

Urban legend, or frightening fact? "One of the better fictional detectives ever penned,"* Seattle's Lou Boldt, and forensic psychologist Dephne Matthews suspect illegal organ harvesting is behind recent assaults on teenage runaways. The trail leads them down dark streets and darker corners of the mind, as they find themselves pursuing a twisted surgeon with his own ideas of mortality and social justice.

Packed with action, The Angel Maker takes the reader on a joy ride from Seattle's homeless to an abandoned homesteading cabin and kennel hidden away in the forests of the Northwest. Daphne Matthews, intent on rescuing a teenage runaway from the madman's scalpel, puts her own life on the line, finding herself face to face with the Angel Maker.

Award-winning author Ridley Pearson carves out and serves up a thriller that will make you look twice at your local veterinarian.

*Book Magazine

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his latest forensic suspense thriller, Pearson ( Probable Cause ) brings maverick Seattle police sergeant Lou Boldt out of early retirement to help solve an especially gruesome crime: the black market "harvesting" of human organs. Police psychologist Daphne Matthews, volunteering at a shelter for runaways and drug abusers, sees 16-year-old Cindy Chapman stagger in one night, dazed and hemorrhaging from just-completed surgery. Perplexed to discover that no hospital has any record of the teen, Daphne contacts her ex-partner (and onetime lover) Lou, who now spends his days caring for his baby boy and playing jazz piano at a local club. The grisly evidence suggests that someone has stolen Cindy's kidney and used electroshock to erase her memory. Lou is lured back to his old job, and he discovers with Daphne three other cases of runaways who died after botched surgery, with evidence pointing to a "harvester" who uses veterinary techniques. The two must race to catch this medical monster before he makes his next fatal extraction. Pearson's engaging forensic detail--he makes complicated, potentially disgusting facts almost entertaining--and brisk prose will have readers racing to the cliffhanger climax. Literary Guild selection.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Potent blend of medical thriller and police procedural that resurrects the cop-hero of Pearson's Undercurrents (1988) and pits him against--of all things--a maniacal veterinarian. Lou Boldt has been off the Seattle force for two years, tending his infant son and playing jazz piano at a local dive, but his extraordinary empathy for murder victims won't let him refuse the request of police shrink and ex-lover Daphne Matthews (whose throat was slashed in Undercurrents) to help with her new case--a series of street kids found dead and missing a kidney, liver, or lung. Immediately suspecting that a transplant surgeon is ``harvesting'' the organs and selling them at great profit, Boldt rejoins the SPD and pushes for advice from the medical examiner (the narrative bristles with the sort of forensic detail that informed Undercurrents). Meanwhile, Pearson bares his villain- -sociopathic society vet Elden Tegg--as we see him snatching social-worker Sharon Shaffer with an eye to selling her heart to a mobster whose wife is dying from heart disease. Unlike Undercurrents, then, where suspense derived from ``whodunit,'' the tension here is strictly--and tightly--time-wound: Can Boldt i.d. the killer and rescue Sharon--or can Sharon herself escape from the remote dog kennel where Tegg's imprisoned her, naked and terrified- -before the vet wields his scalpel? Thriller fans will note that this setup strongly echoes Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs--but Pearson matches Harris's pace as the hours tick down, marking off twists (a hiker chancing on the kennel) and hot suspense sequences (a pawnshop sting to break into Tegg's computer) until the cathartic, brutal climax. Exceptionally gripping and full of amazing forensic lore (e.g., that Band-Aids emit low-level radioactivity from being sterilized): a top-flight offering from an author who's clearly found his groove. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 539 KB
• Print Length: 452 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0786890088
• Publisher: Hyperion (August 14, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B007SO32W4
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #59,427 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding book - dynamite plot! January 16, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Mass Market Paperback

One of the best thrillers I have read in a while. Tons of suspense, it constantly leaves you hanging, forcing you to read just a little more, and then a bit more still. Even though you know how it will turn out in the end, the interesting and original story will keep you plugged in all the way. Another excellent book that has a somewhat similar plot is Extreme Measures by Michael Palmer.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A grim, ugly story May 8, 2000

By Doug Vaughn HALL OF FAME

Format:Mass Market Paperback

I generally enjoy Ridley Pearson's books but I have to say that I found The Angel Maker more than a little unpleasant. There is, in truth, a grim fascination with the story, but "grim" is the opperative word. I was never able to escape, while reading this, the oppressive feeling that Pearson was playing an ugly joke on the reader. To use murdering street kids for their organs as a premise for a plot, to make clear who the villain is, and to make the tension of the story revolve around saving one particular potential victim in time, results in an unsatisfactory blend of classic melodrama and contemporary urban myth. I read it, but I didn't like it. Part of the problem, for me, is that I think using kids as victims in crime drama is a cheap appeal for emotion. While kids frequently are the victim of vicious crimes, they are more likely to be victimized by their own family than anonymous psychos and evil doctors.

While there is a story here that many will find sufficiently interesting, I cannot recommend it.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars HEY! Wait a sec! I'm NOT and ORGAN DONOR! August 27, 2001

By Gypsychick

Format:Audio Cassette

This is the second in the series for crime solvers Lou Boldt and Daphne Matthews, the psychologist with a past and the scars to prove it, and retired-cop-turned-Mr.-Mom, Lou Boldt. A series of corpses begin to turn up sans some of their inner organs, Daphne begins to put two and two (or two and whatever is left) together. She manages to pull together enough clues to entice her old partner back into the hunt. The story itself if an interesting and novel idea. John Glover's frantic and frenetic read of the story and his unique audio interpretation of each character is riveting if a bit nerve racking as he never lets up and keeps the listener in a constant state of near hysteria. But even such a horror fan as this reviewer has grown to be over the years, this mystery was just a bit too gruesome for me and Pearson's characterization of a live harvesting vicitim was more than I could take. What happened to those plain old garden variety serial killers and psychos of mysteries gone by?

Leave it on the shelf unless you have a strong stomach.

More About the Author

Ridley Pearson (www.ridleypearson.com), the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction at Wadham College, Oxford University, is the bestselling author of over 35 novels including, Peter And the Starcatchers (co-written with Dave Barry), the young adult novel, The Kingdom Keepers, and two dozen crime novels including: Probable Cause, Beyond Recognition and Killer Weekend (July 2007). His novel The Diary Of Ellen Rimbauer, a prequel to a Stephen King miniseries, was a New York Times #1 bestseller, as was Peter and the Shadow Thieves (#1 for 6 weeks). Ridley adapted The Diary Of Ellen Rimbaurer for ABC Television; it aired in 2003.

Peter and the Starcatchers is to open as a stage play, off-Broadway in March 2011, under Disney Theatrical.

Ridley is a founding member of, and plays bass guitar in, the all-author rock band, The Rockbottom Remainders (www.rockbottomremainders.com), with Dave Barry, Stephen King, Scott Turow, Mitch Albom, Amy Tan and Greg Iles. The band has raised over 2.5 million dollars for charities over its 18 year history.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#77 in Books > Teens

#77 in Books > Teens