No Witnesses

Starred review from October 3, 1994
A rare humanism and meticulous attention to procedural detail have marked Pearson's thrillers featuring Seattle cop Lou Boldt (Undercurrents; The Angel Maker). In the mournful detective's third match-up against a maniacal serial killer, Pearson outdoes himself by eschewing scenes from the murderer's point of view (and the pandering to bloodlust inherent in such scenes) in order to focus solely on the terrible toll wrought on victims and cops. Here the villain is tampering with products of Adler Foods, a giant company that he or she blames for a long-ago crime. The bodies of poisoned children and adults turn up everywhere as Boldt and his SPD/FBI task force, including series regular Daphne Matthews, a police psychologist, race to ID and trap the killer. Instead of forensic detail, Pearson this time highlights high-tech procedures: computer warfare against the killer's use of ATMs to collect a ransom; cutting-edge surveillance techniques. A tangled subplot about a possible culprit among the cops drags the suspense slightly but some extraordinarily tense cat-and-mousing between cops and killer more than makes up for it. This is a serial-killer novel that speaks to readers' hearts even as it jangles their nerves-and it's not to be missed. $150,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections; author tour.

September 1, 1994
Wealthy food industry mogul Owen Adler receives a series of FAXes demanding that he liquidate his business and commit suicide within a month. The alternative is that consumers of Adler Foods will begin to die. After the deadline passes and two children are hospitalized with a mysterious infection, Adler lets his girlfriend, Seattle forensic psychologist Daphne Matthews, contact detective Lou Boldt. Boldt's empathy for the rising number of victims compels him to put his life at risk as he coordinates an extended investigation while trying to prevent mass panic. Coincidences figure prominently in the plot, yet the genuine humanness of Boldt and Matthews and the breakneck speed of the action will please fans of Pearson (The Angel Maker, Delacorte, 1993). For most public libraries. [Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections.]-V. Louise Saylor, Eastern Washington Univ. Lib., Cheney

Starred review from August 1, 1994
A crime without a crime scene? That's the scenario in Ridley Pearson's latest thriller starring Seattle detective Lou Boldt and police psychiatrist Daphne Matthews. A brilliant but deeply disturbed young man with a big-time grudge against the owner of a frozen-food company decides to take his revenge by poisoning the company's products, first with cholera, then with strychnine. Ugly deaths follow, but the man responsible stays far out of reach, faxing extortion letters from a laptop over public-telephone lines and retrieving ransoms electronically, through ATM transfers. Boldt, a master at close analysis of forensic evidence, is stymied: without a crime scene, a place where the criminal is known to have been, there are no physical links to his identity and, of course, no witnesses. As the harried detective struggles to find a forensic trail through vaporous electronic backroads, Matthews works the psychological soil, creating mental fingerprints in the absence of physical ones. As in past Bold-Matthews adventures--"Undercurrents" (1988) and "The Angel Maker" (1993)--the combination of meticulous investigative detail and excruciating, screw-tightening suspense is utterly riveting. The personal dramas that serve as subplots--Matthews involvement with the frozen-food mogul and Boldt's struggle to balance work and home--add texture, but, finally, like Boldt himself, we are obsessed with the case and come to resent our heroes' personal lives for taking us away from the action even momentarily. The serial-killer novel is a much-abused genre these days; it is as if the success of "Silence of the Lambs" has spawned a whole generation of literary copycat killers. Prosecute the copycats but, by all means, don't include Pearson among them. He elevates any genre in which he chooses to work, and right now he's the best thriller writer alive. ((Reviewed August 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)