Fiona Brand, Body Work

Body Work

Fiona Brand

Mira, Mar 2006, $6.99, 384 pp.

ISBN: 0778322890

Twenty-five years ago in Atlanta someone rapes and murders young women leaving gypsum on their body and taking their hair. Soon the case turns national as similar homicides surface in Florida, New York, and the West Coast some ten years old. The Feds conclude that the gypsum is used to make memento masks of the victims. Law enforcement official Stephen Dexter believes his older half-brother Etienne is the killer as he fits the FBI profile perfectly, though he would not be shocked if his sibling's twin Charles is in cahoots; he hates both of his half-brothers who treated him like a "worm".

In the present, Jane Gale cannot remember anything from when she was seven years old and a serial killer murdered her mother. Now an adult, she has written a best selling novel that stuns the still free mask killer as he realizes that her muse is her eyewitness memory of him. He decides he must kill the author just in case she regains more of that nightmarish memory she lost.

This tale occurs during three different time periods, opening up forty-five years ago when the Dexters were preadolescents being abused by Stephen's biological mother; switching to a serial killer twenty-five year ago; and finally the present with Jane's novel. The storyline is gripping in all three eras, but though the opening scenario sets behavioral patterns for the future, they feel like three different tales. Still this is a deep look at the child who becomes the adult, as the three Dexters and Jane each had youthful traumas that haunt them as adults. Fiona Brand provides a solid character driven serial killer thriller.