Siren's Call
Mary Ann Mitchell
Medallion, Feb 2005, $6.99, 244 pp.
ISBN 1932815163

Sirena ran away from home as a young teen to escape the vicious beatings inflicted on her by her father. She moved in with Joe who had her make kiddie porn movies until she told him she wasn't going to do it anymore. Now she works as a stripper at Silky Femmes in a small out of the way Florida town. She has friends she cares about like the bartender Ross who keeps an eye out for her and the girlfriend of the owner Chrissie.

Sirena also has a very interesting hobby. She picks up men at the club and brings them to her isolated cabin. She has sex with them and at their moment of climax she kills them. She takes their bones and makes furniture out of them but the police and a private detective are beginning to think she's a killer. Both the private detective and the police know she was the last person to see a john she picked up alive; the private detective thinks she might be a killer while the police officer wants to jump her bones. Sirena thinks that Chrissie will make a good partner in her hobby but letting her in on her secret leads to a whole new set of problems for this killing machine.

SIRENA'S CALL is horror of the human kind. There are no supernatural beings in this serial killer thriller but Sirena is the personification of pure evil. She repels readers just as Stephen King's monsters do because they can't believe she is capable of such atrocities. The denizens of Silky Femmes are all criminals to one degree or another which is one of the reasons this book is so chilling and mesmerizing.

Harriet Klausner