Kirkus Review

An FBI agent and a Denver homicide detective tackle a pair of sex crimes that keep crisscrossing each other in all the wrong ways. Ten years ago, Kendall Beck stopped her car to pick up a woman running along the highway. As it turned out, Amy Carrington was fleeing from the serial killer dubbed the Reaper. Her rescue was shockingly short-lived: the Reaper caught up with the pair on the street outside the police station, shot Kendall and left her for dead, then drove off once again with the captive he would shortly torture, rape, and murder. Kendall, who still can't forget or forgive her failure, has compensated by developing an aggressive profile at the FBI. When Scott Williams, whom she's about to arrest for sexually abusing his 5-year-old daughter, Emily, attacks her, she beats him so badly that her superior is tempted to put her on administrative leave. Instead, she gets sucked into a completely different case: the disappearance of Gwen Tavich, the friend and roommate who'd borrowed her SUV and vanished. Kendall's only official status in the case is complainant--in an especially neat touch, she forces the reluctant cops to investigate by reporting her car stolen--but Detective Adam Taylor, who's working the case, is drawn to her and takes her into his confidence. Once Gwen turns up dead, the leading suspect in her murder is Tyson Butler, her fiance and partner in a successful restaurant, but more and more forensic evidence links her murder to the earlier work of the Reaper. Could Ty really have been killing young blond women for more than 10 years? And if he hasn't been, who has? An unsparing professional-grade debut for readers who can take it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.