Lindsay Jayne Ashford Frozen

Frozen

Lindsay Jayne Ashford

Dunne, Sep 2006, $22.95

ISBN: 0312355815

West Midlands Police Detective Superintendent Martin Leverton asks for Birmingham psychiatrist and profiler Dr. Megan Rhys to help with the murders of two women. He explains they found semen linking the murders of Natalie Bailey with Donna Fieldhouse. With school on holidays so she has no lectures to provide so Megan agrees to help the police.

The clues in both cases fail to make sense as if someone reversed the biological evidence between the two victims. Additionally, DS Leverton wonders if one of his cops is the killer; he especially wants Megan to look closely at Donaldson and Costello. As Megan begins to organize the evidence from the rubbish, more homicides occur of people she knows that leads the profiler to wonder if someone close to her may be the killer

This entertaining British police procedural enables the reader to understand the mindset of the serial killer when his thoughts rotate with that of the heroine about halfway into the book; however, this Hitchcockian approach lacks the level of suspense the master filmmaker brought to the plot. Still the cat and mouse story line is fun to follow as Megan feels that Leverton wants her to fail or if not him someone in the department is misdirecting her. Ironically the reader knows the killer long before Megan whose errors in judgment cost the lives of at least one victim in Lindsay Jayne Ashford's fine serial killer tale.

Harriet Klausner