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133 of 135 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Four Families and a Serial Killer, December 15, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Tami Hoag gives us an entertaining and thought-provoking story in this smoothly-written book. It is 1985, and we are in a small, quiet town in California. There, we meet four children in Anne Navarre's fifth-grade class. Dennis is a foul-mouthed bully. Roach is his toady. Tommy is bright and well-behaved. Wendy is smart and cool. She and Tommy are best friends.
Their lives change forever one afternoon when they cut through a park on the way home from school. Tommy stumbles and falls into a depression and comes face to face with a dead woman - obviously a victim of a horrible murder. Terrified, Roach runs away. Wendy and Tommy are paralyzed with fright. Dennis thinks it is all pretty cool. We see the huge effects the event has on the children and on their very different families.
Detective Tony Mendez notes that the victim was rendered deaf by the murderer, and her eyes and mouth were glued shut, so she was helpless before being murdered by a peculiar pattern of stab wounds. A victim in another county died similarly, and Mendez learns that another young woman is missing. It looks like a serial killer. He calls for help from the FBI, and it comes in the form of FBI Profiler Vince Leone. Together, they set out to track down the killer, while matters become steadily more-frightening.
If you can't identify the serial killer immediately, you should turn in your junior detective badge, but the identity is not obvious to the detectives until we reach a breathless climax late in the story. It is a tale that is well worth reading.
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84 of 92 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Things like this don't happen here.", November 28, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Tami Hoag's "Deeper than the Dead" takes place in the "civilized upscale town" of Oak Knoll, California in 1985. A sadistic serial killer is abducting, assaulting, mutilating, and murdering young women. He is organized and extremely careful to leave no incriminating evidence behind. One day, while roughhousing in a neighborhood park, ten-year old Tommy Crane accidentally comes across one of the victims, who had been "killed and discarded like a broken doll." Tommy and his close friend, Wendy Morgan, are deeply traumatized by this experience. Life in Oak Knoll will ever be the same.
The author's taste for the grisly is in full evidence here. She not only examines the physical damage that one crazed human being can inflict upon another, but also tears away the façade that hides an unpleasant truth from the world. Some apparently happy and intact families are, in reality, deeply dysfunctional. The book's heroine, Anne Navarre, is a fifth-grade teacher who is twenty-eight and unmarried. She has mixed feelings when forty-eight Vince Leone, an FBI man and a pioneer in criminal profiling, comes to town and takes a fancy to her. Should she open her heart to someone who is twenty years her senior and who might leave as quickly as he came? As conditions in Oak Knoll deteriorate, Anne's main concern is for the welfare of her students. She wonders if they will end up in psychiatric care for the rest of their lives.
"Deeper than the Dead" is a suspenseful and mildly entertaining thriller, marred by some prosaic, heavy-handed, and cliché-ridden writing. (Example: "With his victim, he was in control, he could let loose the self that existed in the innermost part of him.") However, some vividly described characters do get our undivided attention: Anne is lovely, compassionate, and altruistic; Vince is tough, clever, and determined. The children's plight is truly poignant; they are at the mercy of fate and their parents; it is difficult to decide which is worse. One twist is that, since the action takes place in the mid-eighties, the authorities do not have the advantage of computer databases, DNA profiling, or other modern techniques to move the investigation along more quickly. Be warned that only those who can handle an uncompromising look into the murkiest and most depressing recesses of the human psyche will be able to stomach the bleak tone of Hoag's latest novel. There is plentiful gore and profanity, and only occasional bits of sardonic humor to lighten up the gloomy proceedings.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scary, intense with plenty of twists and turns!, December 14, 2009
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This story takes place in 1985 and the first chapter opens with a child's type of writing about his dad with things like "My hero is my dad. He is a great person..." and below each writing are the thoughts of the killer as he thinks of the woman he is murdering as "perfect" because she is blind and mute and beautiful. A very chilling beginning especially as after the killer drops the body, he remembers he has to pick his kid up after school!
About five days later, one mean boy, Dennis Farman, who is a year older than the other kids who are ten is trying to get the other kid, Tommy Crane, in trouble with taunts. Wendy Morgan who is Tommy's friend, tells him to speak up for himself. A fourth child, Cody Roache, who is a follower of Dennis manages to get himself in trouble with the teacher, Anne Navarre. Miss Navarre is young and pretty and like most young boys, Tommy adores her. Luckily the last bell rings and the kids take off. Tommy and Wendy live near each other and so take a trail that leads through a big park that is part of a forest. As they do they hear Dennis and Cody yell and head after them so Tommy grabs onto Wendy and they take off running and veer off the trail. They jump over an embankment and Cody and Dennis jump too and when they land Tommy realizes he smells something awful and comes face to face with a dead woman. As the other three see this, Cody screams and runs away. Wendy keeps her cool and tells Dennis he has to call his Dad who is a deputy sheriff. Dennis thinks it is pretty cool.
This is just the beginning of a tale of murders and the hunt for the killer which due to the children finding the body also involves Ann Navarre, Detective Tony Mendez and his friend from the FBI, Vince Leone. Vince is one of a new breed at the FBI using a new technique called profiling to get into the mind of a serial killer.
This is a very fascinating story but I did find there were a few too many references to the fact that they DIDN'T have DNA testing yet which would have simplified things. It wasn't really needed more than once.
Good read - recommended.
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