Beverly Barton, The Dying Game

The Dying Game

Beverly Barton

Zebra, Apr 2007, $6.99

ISBN: 0821776894

In Chattanooga, though her husband Judd would object to her showing off a house at night, realtor Jennifer Walker agrees to take a potential customer and his wife to see an expensive mansion. However, instead of a sale that she would use to furnish a nursery, the man slices off her hands before killing her. He leaves behind a rose and a devastated spouse, who hires his friend's Powell private investigative firm to uncover the identity of the killer.

Over the next three years and eight months, twenty-nine beauty queens starting with Jennifer have been butchered by the Beauty Queen Killer, but so far there is no progress in apprehending the culprit. Judd has stopped living except for his obsession to wrap his hands around the killer's neck. That is until now. Apparently in Williamstown, Kentucky, Barbara Jean Hughes, while visiting her sister, saved Gale Ann Cain's life after the killer sliced off her legs. Griff Powell sends former Chattanooga detective, employee Lindsay McAllister to see Judd, whom she fell in love with when she was still a cop while he grieved his loss then but now Judd shows interest as he demands to join the hunt for a deadly and deranged predator.

THE DYING GAME is an action-packed cat and mouse thriller with several incredible yet plausible twists that will shake readers into leaving the lights on all night. The storyline is fast-paced, but it is the psychologically damaged survivors like Judd and the sisters who make the tale real. A romantic subplot is deftly interwoven into Beverly Barton's tense thriller and readers will look forward to the sequel starring Griff and his FBI enemy combatant.

Harriet Klausner