Rebecca Drake The Next Killing

The Next Killing

Rebecca Drake

Pinnacle, Sept 2007, $6.99, 416 pp.

ISBN 9780786018062

She never expected to get a job at St. Ursula's Preparatory Academy but when she was offered the position she was glad to take it. Lauren Kavanaugh hopes this time the writer who has been stalking her for years with letters condemning her for years will not find her. She has no idea teaching history at St. Ursula's will be like diving head first into the frying pan. The first day she is there, she goes out running and finds the dead body of a student tied to a tree.

The students openly exposed her belief in the Wiccan religion which didn't make her popular with the girls. Lauren comes under the operation of a secret group in the school and she later finds in the woods cigarette butts and a half burned picture of the dead student in the water swimming naked. Someone doesn't like her nosing around so when Lauren goes back she sees a figure in the woods. She gives chase and almost trips over a wire tied between two trees. Lauren knows the person lured her to that spot so that she would be killed. When she tells the headmistress, they go to the spot but the wire is gone. Nobody believes her and then a second student is killed.

Readers who like the thrillers of Wendy Corsi Staub, Rick Mofina and P.J. Parish will definitely want to read THE NEXT KILLING. It is a chilling thriller of evil gone unchecked and the protagonist is a great heroine who risks her life to find out what is really going on at the school. Lauren has her own past that influences how she investigates, which adds to the tension of a character driven prep school thriller.

Harriet Klausner