Hot Lights, Cold Steel

April 11, 2011
In Lyle's so-so second thriller featuring Huntsville, Ala., criminal consultant and lumber company owner Dub Walker (after Stress Fracture), Walker's college crush, Miranda Edwards, asks for his help in tracing her wayward 18-year-old daughter, Noel. Noel, who's been paying for her higher education by turning tricks, hasn't been heard of since going on a date with a friend 10 days earlier. The assignment, which has a personal resonance for Walker (his sister, Jill, was abducted and never found), morphs into something quite different after two corpses turn up in a shallow grave with wounds consistent with some kind of surgical procedure. Walker's investigation alternates with the perils of Alejandro Diaz, the utterly unsympathetic lowlife who's responsible for burying the two cadavers. The clichéd climax will leave few readers satisfied.

May 1, 2011
When Dub Walker, the forensic investigator introduced in Stress Fracture (2010), steps in to help an old friend locate her missing daughter, he has no idea whats coming. The girls body is found, buried with another young woman, and evidence indicates they werent merely murdered. They were also, prior to death, repeatedly operated on by someone with top surgical skills. When more bodies turn up with similar physical evidence, Walker knows he has a serial killer on his hands. Like Stress Fracture, this one gives equal weight to the mind of the investigator and the actual investigation. It also presents the perpetrator, whose identity we know early on, well before Walker knows it, as a three-dimensional character. Lyle doesnt shy away from graphic imagery, so readers who prefer that their thrillers lack close contact with body parts might find this caper a bit unsettling. Messy bits aside, its a suspenseful, psychologically intriguing, genuinely powerful thriller.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)