Night Terrors

March 4, 2013
In Palumbo’s riveting third Daniel Rinaldi mystery (after 2011’s Fever Dream), the Pittsburgh, Pa., doctor applies his therapeutic skills to a prickly former FBI special agent, Lyle Barnes, who suffers from night terrors after a career of tracking down serial killers. Adding to Barnes’s woes is a murderer out to get every person who helped put serial killer John Jessup behind bars, including Barnes, who goes into protective custody. Meanwhile, Rinaldi agrees to help Maggie Currim prove the innocence of her troubled adult son, Wes, who has confessed to the gruesome decapitation of a local businessman. Answers prove elusive as the murders begin to pile up, and Barnes escapes from FBI custody. Palumbo ratchets up the stakes in this grisly psychological thriller, but maintains the emotional complexity as Rinaldi weighs his loyalty to his patients against his faith in the FBI.

April 15, 2013
Pittsburgh clinical psychologist Daniel Rinaldi (Fever Dream, 2011, etc.) finds to his sorrow that even serial killers have fans. Now that Wesley Currim has confessed to killing wealthy Wheeling coal-mine executive Edward Meachem and led Chief Avery Block and Detective Sgt. Harve Randall to the headless corpse, you'd think the case would be closed. But Wes' mother, Maggie, swears he's innocent and provides him with a cast-iron alibi he's determined to repudiate. Do Block and Randall have the right man in custody? Dr. Rinaldi, who went along with them since Wes had refused to talk unless he was called in, can't say. And he has no time to yield to Maggie's pleas and break Wes' confession because he's been snatched off the street by FBI agent Neal Alcott and plunged into a different nightmare. Even though John Jessup, convicted of killing four prostitutes, has been beaten to death during a riot in an Ohio prison, the pen pal calling himself "Your Biggest Fan" is determined to avenge him by carrying on in his tradition. In short order, the prison guard who killed Jessup, the judge who sentenced him to four life sentences and the Cleveland ADA who prosecuted him are shot. Not surprisingly, Lyle Barnes, the retired FBI profiler who helped nail Jessup, is having night terrors, and Alcott wants Rinaldi to meet with him and calm him down. For his part, Rinaldi wants to be left alone to consummate his stymied romance with Detective Eleanor Lowrey of the Pittsburgh PD. How likely is that when the entire tri-state region is full of serial killers and killers-in-training? Some thrillers are beach reads. Palumbo's are strictly for late at night and for readers who have no pressing engagements early the next day.

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May 1, 2013

Snowstorms only make a nightmarish case worse for Dr. Rinaldi and the others trying to save a former FBI profiler whose life is in grave danger in this thrilling case, number three for the psychologist (after Fever Dream).

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2013
Psychotherapist Dan Rinaldi has his hands full in the third entry in this series (following Fever Dream, 2011). A confessed murderer in West Virginia tells police he'll lead them to the location of his victim's body only if Rinaldi comes along. Returning home to Pittsburgh, Rinaldi is literally abducted by a spectacularly arrogant FBI agent and delivered to his new patient, a retired FBI profiler whose decades of communing with deeply twisted minds have unhinged him. Palumbo, an award-winning Hollywood screenwriter turned psychotherapist, uses all his professional experience to craft short, action- and tension-filled chapters and insightful sketches of people traumatized by violence. The pace accelerates when the stricken profiler escapes from the FBI's protection; the Feds believe he's on the hit list of a determined killer. Since Rinaldi can't do what he was abducted to do, he agrees to meet the West Virginia killer's mother, who convinces Rinaldi that her son couldn't have committed the murder he has confessed to committing. A twisty plot, lots of action, and a stalwart shrink make Night Terrors solid crime fare.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)