The Last Dead Girl

November 11, 2013
Set in 1998, this prequel to 2009’s Bad Things Happen puts Dolan’s gifts as a storyteller on full display. Series hero David Malone (who later becomes David Loogan) finds himself sitting in the Rome, N.Y., police station, the prime suspect in the investigation into the murder of Jana Fletcher, with whom he recently began an affair. David soon learns that Jana was involved with the Innocence Project, an organization committed to freeing the wrongly accused. Believing Jana’s murder to have some connection with her investigation of Gary Dean Pruett, a man convicted of killing his wife, David searches out those involved in the Pruett case for answers. Throughout David is secretly followed by K, an elusive, homicidal deviant who wants to stop David from discovering the truth. That K doesn’t just kill David right off doesn’t really make sense—after all, he has few qualms about murder—but if you can look past this detail, you’re in for a suspenseful ride. Agent: Victoria Skurnik, Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.

January 1, 2014
Stung by discovering his fiancee's infidelity, an upstate real estate inspector walks out on her and into a relationship with a local law student--a relationship that turns even more intense with the student's murder. As he tells Detective Frank Moretti, David Malone knew Jana Fletcher for 10 days before her death. And as Moretti tells him, they'd been lovers for 10 days as well, and there's no suspect more obvious when David finds Jana strangled to death. Except for discovering her body, he insists he had nothing to do with her murder; more likely she was killed by whoever dropped the Popsicle stick in the woods nearby. Thanks to a series of cutaways to the perp's viewpoint, the reader doesn't have to take David's word for it. The killer, identified only as K, is indeed the man who's been watching Jana from the woods, warming up for her murder by snuffing Jolene Halliwell, a hooker who attached herself to him a little too insistently. In fact, as Moretti's compulsive investigation gradually reveals, Jana's death is only the latest in a string of violence that extends back two years--a saga that melds seduction, prostitution, drug dealing and kidnapping into an unholy mess swirling around unlovely high school teacher Gary Dean Pruett, whom Jana was determined to free from prison since she was convinced that he hadn't killed his wife, Cathy, even though he'd clearly been cheating on her with his (barely) former student Angela Reese. Nor has Jana's death brought this murderous string to an end. As in his first two thrillers (Very Bad Men, 2011, etc.), Dolan plays out the complications with a spider's patience. This time, however, an unmemorable culprit makes his infernal logic seem just a tad less inevitable, scary and remorseless.

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Starred review from December 1, 2013
In this prequel to Dolan's terrific Bad Things Happen (2009), David Malone (not yet David Loogan) is driving alone at night in upstate New York when he assists Jana Fletcher, who has hit a deer. They hit it off and spend some time togetherbut 10 days later, Jana is dead, murdered in her own apartment, and David is being questioned by the police. Haunted, he moves into her place and tries to track down her killer. This simple premise only hints at the reading pleasure here. Dolan's seemingly effortless prose sets off dialogue that surprises and delights, and his intricate plot is simply dazzling: a twisting, shifting labyrinth of events, characters, and motivations, puzzled out on the fly by a sleuth who is bright enough to think things through, brave enough to buck personal danger, and amateur enough to make dumb mistakes (like tailing a cop in a truck with his own name painted on the door). Jana's story, when we learn it, is horrifying yet beautifully told. After the slightly disappointing Very Bad Men (2011), this trip into David's past is every bit as goodif not betterthan the first time we saw him.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)