"A winning suspense thriller"
They nicknamed him the Collector because Albert Stuckey
captured his victims and slowly tortured and raped them
over a period of months in ways too horrible to imagine.
Eventually he broke their will to live before killing
them. Top FBI profiler Maggie O'Dell spent two years
profiling Stuckey before she could help bring him down and
see him locked away. During a transfer to a maximum-security prison, Stuckey
frees himself and kills two armed escorts before
vanishing. When the FBI learns about the Collector's
escape, they remove Maggie from the field and reassign her
to a teaching position. However when acquaintances of
Maggie are murdered with an M.O. identical to that of
Stuckey, she is placed in charge of the case in the hopes
that lightning strikes twice. If she fails she knows she
will be better off dead. SPLIT SECOND centers on the obsessive behavior of the
heroine and the villain especially towards one another
because both are not just determined, they need to bring
their opponent down. Thus readers have a front row seat to
the ultimate cat and mouse game in which the person playing
the feline seems to change with every twist of the plot.
Alex Kava fills her psychological thriller with plenty of
action as well, but it is her characters whose motivations
are quite understandable and moves the audience. SPLIT
SECOND is one book that would be a crime for sub-genre fans
to miss. Harriet Klausner
Reviewed by PNR Group Member
Posted July 16, 2001
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