Customer Reviews

Face of a Killer

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Sydney Fitzpatric, FBI forensic artist, is having a hard time fitting in at her new assignment, and it doesn't help that she suspects her ex-boyfriend is keeping tabs on her. Throw in a reluctant (at least at first) partner, the normal angst of her relationship with her mother and step father, a precocious 13-year-old sister, and a self-serving, political-insider 'uncle' who is seeking reelection, and the characters alone offer a treasure-trove of tension as a backdrop to a provocative plot.

It is the anniversary of Sid's father's murder, and she visits the man convicted. During this visit, the first seeds of doubt creep into her thoughts as to the man's guilt. So begins a journey where the Pollyanna of the FBI office travels into the gray area between right and wrong with the help of Carillo, her partner and an agent who is much more flexible about the rules. Sid discovers much about her father and his associates and about the man who has languished in jail for 20 years awaiting execution for her father's murder. But most-importantly, she learns a lot about herself in the process.

The story starts out a bit slowly, but once things get moving, watch out. Sydney is a sympathetic and compelling woman, and her quest for the truth is one you hope, until the very end, won't destroy her and her family.

I highly recommend Robin Burcell's 'Face of a Killer.'

Wow! What a ride! I had never read anything by Robin Burcell before, so I did not know that I was in for such a treat.

Face of a Killer features a very likeable and sympathetic main character in Sydney. Sydney has had to live through some traumatic events in her youth when her father was brutally murdered - the police think they have his killer and he has been in prison.

Fast forward to present day in which Sydney is an FBI agent and forsenic artist. She comes face to face with a crime victim who seems to be describing her father's murderer as the person responsible for her rape! But this can't be!!!

Sydney is haunted by this and decides to visit her father's murderer in prison in order to get things straight in her own head - but this backfires.

As Sydney tries to make sense of what is happening, she discovers that her entire family is now in danger. With the clock ticking down, she needs to get to the bottom of this and fast!

While the plotline I have just described sounds like pretty standard stuff, I have to say that Burcell manages to take a so-so storyline and turn it into an explosive thriller. She really had me wondering how Johnnie Wheeler could be in prison AND brutally raping women at the same time. I also liked the fact that while Sydney is digging, she is discovering things about her dad she did not know and I am sure, did not really want to know about.

The relationship between her and Carillo is fun and fresh and I also enjoyed Burcell's obvious firsthand knowledge of all things forensic. However, unlike some other authors Burcell does not get bogged down in givins us too much forensic information.

I really, really liked this book and recommend it.

I loved this book. It's intricate, but I had no trouble keeping up with the characters, and that can sometimes be a problem with lots of characters. Burcell knows how to make you "see" them.
The case in this book is one that demands that Sydney, a forensic artist and FBI agent, think and work outside the box and push against the rules a bit, which is not her usual style and makes her uncomfortable at first. She has an ex-boyfriend who made me think I didn't really know what to expect from him. She also has a little sister who's a real hoot. A very cute and smart kid.
I hope to read many other books by this skilled author.

All the other positive reviews are great. This is the first time I've read Burcell, and the way that she writes is clear and descriptive. The content of the novel would also make a great movie.

I can't wait to read another one of her novels.

I think you know the storyline by now so let me just say I loved it and hope to see more of Sydney and maybe even Scotty. I feel the story is as close to the real thing as possible since the author is a policewoman & FBI agent along with being a forensic artist in real life.

I read police procedurals and have liked all of Ms Burcell's books and recommend them. I find Sydney so entertaining I hope she will be returning but now that she has been transferred to Quantico there's so much material there. Of course being involved in a case that has the fictional bank BICTT was great but knowing there was a very real international bank BCCI does give pause to what's happening right now in our world LOL

I enjoyed!

I have to confess!

Robin Burcell is my daughter, and she writes one helluva good page turner with plenty of action and suspense. Moreover, she knows her subject. A former California police detective, Robin was trained by the FBI in forensic drawing (and not merely those simplistic manufactured identikits, either; she really can draw. Long deceased victims have been identified because of her actual reconstructive drawings.).

Similarly, Robin's main character, Sydney Fitzpatrick, is an attractive, engaging and self-possessed forensic artist with the San Francisco branch of the FBI. Haunted by the murder of her father twenty years previously, Sydney uncovers clue after clue, relentlessly pursuing her leads to Houston, Mexico, and back to San Francisco again. Her pursuit leads her into far deeper waters than she bargained for, however; and her forensic drawings, sketched at the beginning of each chapter, gradually reveal the "face of a killer" (Do try to resist the temptation to peek at her finished drawing before you reach the end!).

But don't merely take the word of a proud mother that Robin Burcell's "Face of A Killer" is a smashing detective yarn that you will want to keep on reading. Purchase a copy and discover it for yourself!

Sydney Fitzpatrick is a FBI agent and a forensic artist, she helps where others cannot. She draws the faces of kidnappers, rapists, and murderers. She helps victims which are beyond the help of the police and medicine, she reconstructs the dead. She's 33 years old, but has lived a life time. Her one quest in life is to find out what happened to her father twenty years ago, when his pizza pallor was robbed and burned to the ground with him inside.

Sydney's mother wants nothing more than for her to drop the whole issue. Syd wants to go to San Quentin to face the man who killed her father. When she does, one mystery leads to another, each more perplexing than the last. Johnnie Walker swears he's not the killer, but he saw the man who is. Scotty, Syd's one time boyfriend, wants her to leave the case alone. But as Sydney is drawn into her father's case, she comes to realize that Walker may not be the killer and the killer is out there waiting for her and her family including little sister, Angie--an FBI agent in training at age 12. As things go from bad to worse, Syd comes to face the facts that a long time family friend may be responsible for all of her suffering. If only she can prove it before Walker is executed.

Face of a Killer is the first book in the Sydney Fitzpatrick series published in 2008. It is a turbulent ride from start to finish. As you step on board the roller coaster that is Sydney's life, you go from one misadventure to another. Fighting bad guys in the streets of San Francisco to Baja California to little San Arleta, the action never quits. Again Ms. Burcell gives us a wonderful ride into the life of criminal activity. It is a worthy read with 5 stars.

Sydney Fitzpatrick, FBI forensic artist, is uniquely qualified to draw the titular "face of a killer." But the face of a very particular killer, the man who murdered her father almost exactly 20 years ago as the book opens, is rather elusive. The man convicted of the crime is just days away from his scheduled execution, still proclaiming his innocence. And for the first time in all the intervening years, Sydney finds herself questioning whether there is even the smallest possibility that he was not guilty of the act that has shaped her life. But soon she finds that perhaps everything she thought she knew about her father's life - and his death - was a lie. As Sydney examines this possibility, she uncovers a plot involving a massive conspiracy reaching the highest reaches of political and corporate life.

Sydney, a cop for eight years, now with the FBI for four years, has recently transferred from Washington, D.C. to the San Francisco office, having dumped her former fiancé, also an FBI agent. Above all things, she is known for following the rules, but that becomes more difficult as she begins the investigation, twenty years after the fact, into her father's death, ostensibly the result of a break-in at the pizza parlor he owned. Her father, ex-army, had been a civilian contractor working for the army after his discharge, till a tragic accident forced his retirement. Sydney, then thirteen years old, had been asleep in another part of the pizza parlor when he was killed.

The author, herself an FBI-trained forensic artist, police officer, detective and hostage negotiator for many years, brings an unquestioned authenticity to this suspenseful tale. I have to reluctantly admit that there were times when the narrative felt padded, going over and over the same ground. But the plot is quite interesting, and the author brings the tale to an exciting conclusion.

[Charmingly, Kate Gillespie, the protagonist featured in four of this author's previous novels, makes a cameo appearance here, introduced as "a San Francisco PD homicide inspector" and one of Sydney's girlfriends.]

Face of a killer.

In this San Francisco based thriller author Robin Burcell does an incredible job of character development. Her main character in the book Sydney Fitzpatrick (a forensic artist and FBI agent) works to resolve the murder of her father some 20 years earlier. She is tormented by the fact that there is a man in prison for murdering her father but he may be innocent. The prisoners execution is only 10 days away so she is driven by that time line to resolve the issue. In those 10 days Sydney is faced with a lot of obstacles, emotional, physical and geographical. While she is investigating her fathers case she is forced to deal with the fact that her father might not have been the man she thought he was while growing up. As the case of her fathers murder unfolds the scope story increases giving the reader many possible suspects to think about. The story has many interesting characters, her much younger half sister Angela who approaches everything with a youthful exuberance, Her Mom and Step Dad who just want Sydney to move on. Carrillo who becomes her partner. She has a tough time with this at first because she perceives him as being part good old boys club but they work very well together. She is a get things done by the book whereas he just gets things done whether or not it's by the book. There's her Ex Scotty who has been watching her. There's Senator Gnoble who's in the middle of an election and can't afford any bad press and his aid Prescott who intends to make sure there is no bad press no matter what. Sydney has to unravel the concatenation of events that lead to her fathers murder. Sydney is seeking out justice and closure while discovering a major banking and political fraud and deceit by someone close to her and there is a suicide thrown in.


Because Burcell is a forensic artist and an investigator. She is uniquely qualified to write stories like this and make them believable. She uses this skill deftly in the development of her character Sydney Fitzpatrick. Sydney approaches cases like an investigator would. Not everything is as it seems. Burcell writes in a style that gets you emotionally involved with Sydney Fitzpatrick. She also keeps an air of mystery about some characters leaving the reader to try and determine that characters true intent.

Pay close attention to all of the details in this book because Burcell skillfully intertwines them to become a larger part of the story or makes the reader think they might become a larger part of the story.

Burcell keeps the reader on the edge of their seat. She does a great job of keeping the kind of suspense throughout the novel as it takes you on it's many twists and turns.

Very well written and highly recommended.

This is the introductory novel in a new series featuring Special Agent Sydney Fitzpatrick, a forensic artist for the FBI. As the novel opens Sydney has recently transferred back to her native San Francisco, in part to be near her family and in part to put distance between her and her former boyfriend who is also with the Bureau. It is the 20th anniversary of her father's murder, an event that Sydney had been a near witness to, and her motivation to seek a career in law enforcement. Sydney was depressed by the memories that this anniversary has brought up, more so this year than in the past due to the upcoming execution of her father's killer. She had planned on spending the day drinking but her plans were changed when she was called into to help with a rape case. On her way to the interview Sydney's feeling of being followed, a feeling that she had been having for the past day or so persisted. It was a feeling that she soon discovered was all to justified. Sydney quickly found herself immersed not only investigating a potential serial rapist/killer but also into her father's death and life.

As with all first novels in a new series this one spends a great deal of time introducing the main characters and establishing back stories. In this regard the author has done an excellent job. Sydney is a wonderful character, charming, sympathetic and interesting enough to carry a series quite easily. A wide cast of secondary characters are also introduced, including her family, co-workers and friends, most of which move beyond the two dimensional stock character category to spring to life on their own. The plot is complex enough, and interesting enough to keep the reader turning pages far into the night.

There are some problems with this novel though. Sydney's relationships with both her former boyfriend and her mother are not very realistic. The ex-boyfriend, Scotty is presented as manipulative and controlling yet we are to believe that Sydney is still attracted to him. Her mother, and to a lesser extent her stepfather both seem to feel that Sydney needs to seek their approval over her actions even though she is in her late twenties and has been a law enforcement professional for 8 years. Would a woman strong enough to choose and succeed in such a male dominated field really be so dependent on outside approval that she would be drawn to a domineering boyfriend or tolerate so much parental interference? Additionally the pacing of the story is a bit uneven. At times the story drags a bit, overfilled with details and not much action. At other points the story jumps around so abruptly that this reader at first thought that she had skipped a page or two in error.

Overall though this is an excellent beginning to what promises to be a great new series, one this reader hopes will have a long run.