2 in the Hat

February 8, 2010
Yessayan, the former chief prosecutor for the gang unit of the Suffolk County (Mass.) district attorney’s office, doesn’t make the most of his professional expertise in this improbable serial killer yarn, the sequel to 8 in the Box
. In Franklin Park, where off-duty Boston police detective Angel Alves is coaching a kids’ football team, one of his players stumbles on a dead woman dressed in a fancy gown. Angel finds the body of a man in a tuxedo nearby. Both are posed in a manner identical to the victims of the Prom Night Killer, who’d been dormant for so long that the authorities assumed he was dead, in prison, or retired. Angel’s old sergeant, Wayne Mooney, the lead investigator in the Prom Night Killer case, shares closely held information that enables the pair to rule out a copycat. The main mystery’s unsurprising resolution goes hand in hand with the plot’s less than plausible major shock twist. This is for those who prefer sensationalism to realism in their suspense fiction.