9/11 haunts this book as a critical narrative about its effect on FBI policy in the USA. Because of the profound effect of the terrorism on the law enforcement services, organisations such as the FBI are in danger of losing their grip on less spectacular and more indigenous crimes. Consequently when a serial killer of young women leaves a body provocatively at the FBI training base, it takes cops prepared to work outside the rules in order to respond adequately. For this serial killer likes to play games. He steals women in pairs: one is left dead to function as a sort of map pointing to the whereabouts of the other. The other is still alive, but liable to die of exposure if the police do not move fast and play by the killer's rules.
This time the first body is found by an unusual FBI recruit. Kimberley is the
survivor of a frenzied attack in which her mother and sister died. Identifying
the corpse with her butchered sister, Kimberley links up with a similarly obsessed
cop, Mac. Out of his jurisdiction, he is prepared to defy the authorities who
are moving too slow. They enlist Kimberley's father and female partner, both
private eyes.The plot is extremely well worked out, using with real skill the
technique of not releasing all details to the reader. It seizes the imagination
by getting us to care about the hunters as detectives and as victims so keeping
in mind the offstage sufferings of the young women they are trying to save.
It also manages to play with the identity of the killer until the very last
a difficult feat in this type of story. I strongly recommend The Killing Hour
as a complex and artful rethinking of the American police procedural. Kimberley
is a character we long to succeed, and I would be interested to see more of
her. Lisa Gardner has succeeded in giving a multiple perspectives to a genre
that can easily get bogged down in the single view point of the law. An evocative
and haunting read.
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Susan Rowland
Other books by Lisa Gardner are The Perfect Husband, The Other Daughter,
The Third Victim, The Next Accident and The Surviver’s Club.