When Kay Sharp’s brother is tossed in jail for a minor offence which should have merited only a slap on the wrist, she can’t make sense of it. But she does what she has to do, taking a leave of absence from her job as an FBI profiler based in San Francisco, moving back to Mount Chester, the tiny ski-resort town where she grew up. She expects it to be a quiet six months, just living in her parents’ old house, keeping the home fires burning until her brother gets home. But almost immediately, Mount Chester is rocked by the discovery of a young woman’s body, buried in a strange, ritualistic way that sets Kay’s threat alarms tingling immediately. Kay’s sure it’s a serial killer. Offering her assistance to the local police, she teams up with Detective Elliot to try and catch the killer before the body count rises further.
As the story goes on, we learn more about Kay’s own traumatic past, and then it’s revealed she has a much closer link to the killer than she suspected. That she, herself, is a target for a twisted killer, who has been pulling strings to get her back under his sphere of influence for quite some time.
This is really, really good. Kay is a fascinating character with some major trauma in her background, and the detective she is partnered up with is intriguing in his own right, though we don’t get a lot more than snippets of his background (and hints of the intense crush he is developing on her). There were some big twists in the reveal of the killer’s background and identity, though we’d been getting snippets from his point of view all along. I’d be really intrigued to see where the series goes from here, particularly with Kay’s brother presumably coming home and the two of them settling in together. Five stars for a fascinating start to a great new series of psychological thrillers.
Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this title via NetGalley.
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