Penny's Reviews > Killer Dead, Victim Alive: The serial killer’s dead. The final prisoner's alive. What happened? What’s next?

This was an intriguing, somewhat confusing book with a surprise ending that I have no way of understanding.

A serial killer is holding his victims, both men and women, for days to weeks before killing them. He has an accomplice, an illegal alien, and he uses this status as a hold over her. He seems to be able to kill with impunity and get rid of the bodies without leaving anything to implicate himself, until he unwittingly choses his final victim who is a match for him, both in intelligence and narcissism. The killer is killed, the victim, Christine Weeks is alive and deliberately misleading the police and the FBI, apparently for no other reason than that she can.

It was an interesting premise for a novel; not the first time a victim has been able to kill his or her kidnapper, but with a very original twist. I enjoyed the novel; it was fast-paced and had enough to keep me interested throughout while never being completely convinced by it. The writing was generally good, but in certain places there was far too much telling of the background, the reader was being spoon fed with information the author felt we needed to know and seemingly couldn’t provide in any other way.

I was never wholly convinced by either the killer or his final victim. I fully understood the motivation for the first killing, but never felt it was explained satisfactorily why he continued after that first killing, for which he had some kind of a reason. The same with the victim. Would someone who had gone through that experience, however narcissistic, however ego-driven, really just take the opportunity to mess with the police to prove their superiority?

I received a free copy of this book from LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.