Allison Brennan The Prey

The Prey

Allison Brennan

Ballantine, Jan 2006, $6.99, 416 pp.

ISBN: 0345480236

In Malibu former FBI agent turned mystery writer Rowan Smith finds the media camped outside her beach house. The reporters demand she explain why twenty years old Doreen Rodriguez was killed in Denver with the same name and much of the identical major events in their lives (and deaths) as a character in her book Crime of Opportunity. It has been four years since she left the Feds and it seems to have all come back in the guise of the Fiction Copycat killer.

Denver Police Detective Ben Jackson and LAPD Jim Barlowe warn Rowan that she is the ultimate prey of the culprit. Siblings Michael and Teresa Smith arrive to protect Rowan, who insists she can take care of herself. When a funeral wreath from a "fan" is delivered in memoriam of Doreen, Rowan knows the killer will strike again; Teresa calls her other brother John on assignment out of the country that they need him with his Delta Force experience to be here. He returns to the States to keep Rowan safe as another victim from one of her novels dies.

Though the suspense is high and the action fast-paced, the secondary cast makes believers of the audience that "reality" is imitating fiction in the guise of a sane serial killer plotting his (or her) murders to precise military precision. The besieged heroine always relied on the Glock she sleeps with to keep her safe, but begins to think she would not mind John keeping her bones warm at night. The final twists will shock readers as the killer circles closer to THE PREY with THE HUNT and THE KILL to follow.

Harriet Klausner