Thomas O'Callaghan, The Screaming Room

The Screaming Room

Thomas O' Callaghan

Pinnacle, May 2007, $6.99, 352 pp.

ISBN: 0786018127

Six years ago, NYPD homicide commander Lieutenant John Driscoll lost his daughter to a drunk driver. His beloved wife stayed in a coma in their home all that time before she passed away. Now Driscoll, a grieving widower, is ready to plunge into work to forget his private demons.

His case begins when a series of tourists are killed by blunt forced trauma to the head, their heads scalped, their bodies placed in famous tourist attractions like the Ferris wheel in Coney Island, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Bronx Zoo and many other places. DNA evidence at the scene of the crimes shows that they are dealing with two killers, a male and a female, both identical twins. The killers Angus and Cassie are the victims of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse and their victims are no innocents. Complicating the case is one of the victim's fathers Malcolm Shewster has put a multi-million dollar bounty on the twins. He doesn't want them arrested; he wants them killed so the secrets they know or could come out by other means would be taken to their graves. Both Driscoll and Shewter are racing each other to find the twins which is not easy to do since they are very clever and in a city of nine million they have a lot of places to hide.

Thomas O'Callaghan follows up his debut novel, the BONE THIEF, with a chilling thriller. THE SCREAMING ROOM shows the depravity the human race is capable of, especially where it concerns innocent children. Although readers will be horrified by what the twins endured as children, they elicit no sympathy because of what they do as adults. This is horror of the human kind and it is more terrifying then any Stephen King tale because it is based on reality.

Harriet Klausner