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FBI Special Agent Ana Gray returns in this complex, involving thriller about a dedicated officer's search for a serial rapist that proceeds alongside her passionate and obsessive love affair with a fellow cop, Santa Monica detective Andrew Berringer. Before their relationship culminates in a violent episode that leaves him clinging for life and her accused of attempted murder, the deviant who brutalized the teenage girl Ana has taken into her heart and under her wing has found another victim, and Ana's efforts to stop him before he kills her drive Smith's stunning narrative to a shocking denouement. But the author has additional surprises in store for the reader that involve Andrew's motivations for escalating their passion--to keep Ana from reopening a closed case involving bank robbery, fraud, and deception, which will lead her to reevaluate the man, and the obsession, that has brought her to the brink of personal and professional oblivion. While many authors who feature the same protagonist in all their mysteries simply serve up the same character in different scenarios in each new outing, April Smith expertly illuminates aspects of her heroine's psychological life and devotion to justice that deepen our understanding about who she is--a complicated, brave, multidimensional woman it is a pleasure to meet in this engrossing and powerful novel.
--Jane Adams.
From Publishers Weekly
Intelligent and uncompromising, this second in a series by Smith reprises the successes of her acclaimed first thriller, North of Montana. Feisty, unconventional FBI Special Agent Ana Grey is teamed with tough but compassionate Police Det. Andrew Berringer on a kidnapping case involving Santa Monica teen Juliana Meyer-Murphy. Grey and Berringer continue the tempestuous personal relationship begun in Smith's first novel: "That's how we met. Working the same bank robbery, dubbed `Mission Impossible' because the bandit came in through the roof. We don't always catch the bad guys, but we're great with the nicknames." After Juliana is released alive but physically and psychologically devastated, the case becomes personal for Ana. Learning the harrowing particulars of Juliana's ordeal and observing the well-meaning but brutally invasive examinations the girl must undergo-described in clinical detail-she grows more and more obsessed with the demented killer/rapist, a charismatic ex-marine. As the chase intensifies, so does Ana's troubled relationship with Andrew. An argument that escalates into physical confrontation changes the lives of both when Ana pulls a gun and fires. While Ana is still in the middle of the fallout, the kidnapping case ends in a Silence of the Lambs-style standoff at the killer's private gallery of horrors. Smith's finely calibrated, unsentimental writing and tart humor make her a standout in the genre. She doesn't just tell a story; she illuminates the human condition through the pain and complex lives-and deaths-of her compelling characters.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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