The Analyst

Description

Happy fifty third birthday, Doctor. Welcome to the first day of your death. Dr. Frederick Starks, a New York psychoanalyst, has just received a mysterious, threatening letter. Now he finds himself in the middle of a horrific game designed by a man who calls himself Rumplestiltskin. The rules: in two weeks, Starks must guess his tormentor’s identity. If Starks succeeds, he goes free. If he fails, Rumplestiltskin will destroy, one by one, fifty-two of Dr. Starks’ loved ones—unless the good doctor agrees to kill himself. In a blistering race against time, Starks’ is at the mercy of a psychopath’s devious game of vengeance. He must find a way to stop the madman—before he himself is driven mad. . . .

---

Penzler Pick, February 2002: This thriller from the author of Hart's War is addictive. Analyst Dr. Frederick Starks has just turned 53 and, on his birthday, receives a letter informing him that he has ruined the letter-writer's life and now his own life is about to be ruined.

Starks must solve a riddle, he is told. He must find out whose life he ruined within two weeks. If he does not, he must kill himself. If he does not kill himself, then those nearest and dearest to him will be killed. The letter is signed, Rumpelstiltskin. At first Starks is dismissive--but he does call relatives to see that they are all right. Not all of them are. In fact Starks is convinced that the letter writer is deadly serious when he discovers how the birthday of his 14-year-old great-niece was ruined. He must now engage in the game or be responsible for the lives of others.

While he works frantically to try and unlock the past and find whose life he could possibly have ruined, Rumpelstiltskin is also busy. Within hours of receiving that first shattering letter, one of Dr. Starks's patients throws himself under a subway train, though Starks knows the patient was not suicidal.

When the police tell him that a couple and a homeless woman saw the man jump, Starks tries to find them. He finds only the homeless woman, who tells him that she was given money by the couple to tell what she witnessed. Starks is certain that Rumpelstiltskin must be one of the couple, but he's wrong. It's even more sinister than that, and when he meets the accomplices, he realizes that his adversary has been planning his revenge for years.

Soon, Starks's life is spiraling downward. There is nothing hidden from Rumpelstiltskin. His credit cards, his bank accounts, his patients, his homes in Manhattan and in Massachusetts, his reputation--nothing and no one is safe as Starks races against time as his world shrinks and his options run out. The clock is ticking as he hunts a ruthless psychopath who always seems to be one step ahead of him. As Starks tries to figure out what to do besides react to his life spinning out of control, he uses his training, his dwindling resources, and every weapon available to him to combat this relentless and deadly foe. --Otto Penzler

---

The Madman's Tale: A Novel

Description

It’s been twenty years since Western State Hospital was closed down and the last of its inmates reintegrated into society. Francis Petrel was barely out of his teens when his family committed him to the asylum, after his erratic behavior culminated in a terrifying outburst. Now middle-aged, he leads an aimless, solitary life housed in a cheap apartment, periodically tended to by his sisters, and perpetually medicated to quiet the chorus of voices in his head. But a reunion on the grounds of the shuttered institution stirs something deep in Francis’s troubled mind: dark memories he thought he had laid to rest, about the grisly events that led to Western State Hospital’s demise.

It begins in 1979, when twenty-one-year-old Petrel descends into the state-run purgatory of an overcrowded, understaffed Massachusetts mental hospital. Surrounded by inmates roaming the halls like drugged zombies and raving behind locked doors, well-meaning orderlies, jaded nurses, and patronizing doctors, Francis finds friendship with a motley assortment of fellow patients: a would-be Napoleon, a wise ex-firefighter, and a man obsessed with battling imagined devils. But there’s nothing imaginary about the young nurse found sexually assaulted and brutally murdered late one night after lights-out.

The police suspect an inmate, while patients whisper about visions of a white-shrouded “angel.” But the striking and mysterious prosecuting attorney who arrives to investigate has her own chilling theory—about the grim, telltale “signature” left on the victim’s body, a string of unsolved sex killings, and a very real devil who, by chance or design, has come to turn a madhouse into a slaughterhouse.

Now, with the past creeping back to haunt his thoughts, and nothing but a pencil and the bare walls of his bleak apartment, Francis surrenders to the overwhelming need to tell the story of those nightmarish days. But because the crime was never solved, it’s a story doomed to remain unfinished. Until, like Francis’s long-buried recollections, the killer resurfaces . . . with a vengeance.

A tour de force narrative journey through the eerily unpredictable mind of an utterly unusual hero, The Madman’s Tale will keep even the most astute thriller reader uncertain, unnerved, and unable to resist the tantalizing twists and turns of this fiendishly suspenseful shadow show.


From the Hardcover edition.

---

The Wrong Man: A Novel

Description

Scott Freeman is a man of reason–a college professor grounded in the rational and practical. But he becomes uneasy after finding an anonymous love letter hidden in his daughter’s room: “No one could ever love you like I do. No one ever will. We will be together forever. One way or another.” But the reality of Ashley’s plight far exceeds Scott’s worst suspicions.

One drink too many had led Ashley, a beautiful, bright art student, into what she thought was just a fling with a blue-collar bad boy. But now, no amount of pleading or reasoning can discourage his phone calls, ardent e-mails, and constant, watchful gaze.

Michael O’Connell is but a malignant shadow of a man. His brash, handsome features conceal a black and empty soul. Control is his religion. Cunning and criminal skill are his stock-in-trade. Rage is his language.

The harder Ashley tries to break free, the deeper Michael burrows into every aspect of her life, so she turns in desperation to her divorced parents and her mother’s new partner–three people still locked in a coldly civilized triangle of resentment. But their fierce devotion to Ashley is the common bond that will draw them together to face down a predator.

For Ashley’s family, it is a test of primal love that will drive them to the extreme edge–and beyond–in a battle of wills that escalates into a life-or-death war to protect their own.

From the bestselling master of suspense, John Katzenbach, The Wrong Man is an elegantly crafted and breathtakingly intense read that asks the question, “How far would you go to save the child you love?”


From the Hardcover edition.

---

State of Mind

Description

Twenty-five years ago, Jeffrey and Susan Clayton fled their tyrannical father--a man who was later suspected in the heinous murder of a young student. Though the father was never charged, he committed suicide. Or so it seemed. For someone has sent Susan a cryptic note. Once deciphered, it carries a terrifying message: I have found you.

Meanwhile, a serial killer has invaded a tightly controlled community. Is Jeffrey Clayton's father the source of this latest killing spree? The authorities think so--and they present Jeffrey, now a noted expert on serial killers, with a challenge: Find the butcher responsible for the newborn spate of carnage. Find your father. . . .

---

Susan Clayton, a professional puzzle maker, is stumped by this anonymous note left at her door: "THE FIRST PERSON POSSESSES THAT WHICH THE SECOND PERSON HID." Distracted by the sweltering Florida Keys evening and her cancer-stricken mother in the next room, Susan spends hours before she solves the riddle--it means "I have found you." Ominous words, considering that a serial killer is stalking Florida. And in this novel, Florida is ominous to begin with: it's set in a Robocop-like future society where people carry semiautomatics like breath mints, road rage reigns, and folks gladly trade their right to privacy for a place in a protected community called the Fifty-first State (Katzenbach's scary takeoff on Disney's planned town of Celebration, Florida). Meanwhile, Susan's brother Jeffrey, an authority on serial killers, is finishing up a lecture when his silent security alarm flashes. His metal-detecting alarm was set off by special agent Robert Martin of "State Security" (an American-style SS), who confronts the good professor with some bad news about his late father, a psychopath. Could he be the one who left Susan that threatening note? Can anybody stop the Fifty-first State from getting even scarier? With mounting suspense, Jeffrey, Susan, and their ailing mother put their heads together to keep the futuristic body count from getting wholly out of control. There is perhaps a touch less gore than Katzenbach fans may be used to, but no fewer thrills. He has seen the future, and it will make your hair stand on end. --Rebekah Warren

---

Hart's War

Description

Second Lieutenant Tommy Hart, a navigator whose B-25 was shot out of the sky in 1942, is burdened with guilt as the only surviving member of his crew. Now he is just another POW at the fiercely guarded Stalag Luft 13 in Bavaria.

Then routine comes to a halt with the arrival of a new prisoner: First Lieutenant Lincoln Scott, an African American Tuskegee airman who instantly becomes the target of contempt from his fellow soldiers. When a prisoner is brutally murdered, and all the blood-soaked evidence points to Scott, Hart is tapped to defend the soldier. In a trial rife with racial tension and raw conflict, where the lines between ally and enemy blur, there are those with their own secret motives, and a burning passion for a rush to judgment, no matter what the cost.

---

Stalag 17 meets the best of John Grisham in this tremendously exciting and moving new thriller, about a murder trial inside a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. John Katzenbach has taken elements of his own father's history in such a camp, added a racial twist (the defendant is a black pilot, a member of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen), and created a memorable adventure story that soars with hope and cries out to be filmed.

The first thing that former law student Tommy Hart does after his B-25 is shot down and he--the only survivor--is captured, is to fill out a form for the International Red Cross, telling his family he's alive and requesting, under "Special Items Needed," a copy of Edmund's Principles of Common Law. Amazingly, the book is waiting when he arrives at Stalag Luft Thirteen in the Bavarian woods. Hart soon puts it to good use, defending (with the help of two other prisoners, a former London barrister and a Canadian police detective) the prickly, proud Lieutenant Lincoln Scott when he is charged with killing a racist and corrupt fellow prisoner. The Nazis, especially a resident SS observer, have their own reasons for wanting the trial to be seen as a fair one, and it takes place against the backdrop of a planned mass escape.

Katzenbach deftly balances a dozen major characters with credible scenes of legal and extra-legal action. His previous thrillers, available in paperback, include Day of Reckoning, In the Heat of the Summer, Just Cause, The Shadow Man, State of Mind, and The Traveler. --Dick Adler

---

Traveler

Description

A man, a woman, a car, and a camera on a sentimental journey through the past. He kills, he photographs, she writes about it -- or she dies, too. Detective Mercedes Barren has a reason to give chase: her niece was a victim. So does psychiatrist Martin Jeffers, a specialist in sex offenders and a more than passing acquaintance of the killer.

---

As a jaded detective at the Miami Police Department, Mercedes Barren isn't phased by much. That is, until a late-night phone call awakens her from one nightmare and catapults her into another: her niece has been murdered. Within days, Detective Barren has a surly Islamic fundamentalist in custody cutting a plea bargain--for a series of murders. As much as she would like to believe he murdered her niece, instinct tells her otherwise. Enter Douglas Jeffers, a disgruntled photojournalist who's seen one too many killers, courtrooms, and shredded cadavers. His mission? To commit a series of "copy cat" murders with a twist: he's forcing a young English major to document his journey. Barren catches on, Jeffers's brother (a psychiatrist who specializes in sexual offenders, of course) gets involved, and the motley cast races to a hypertension-inducing finish. Not recommended for those with delicate sensibilities, The Traveler casually throws out descriptions of mutilated organs and vicious assaults with the bored ease of a maître d'. Although it has a tendency to veer into melodrama, the caffeinated cadence and memorable one-liners make for a respectable beach read: "Killers were the Kleenex of the drug industry; they were used a few times and then discarded unceremoniously." --Rebekah Warren

---