Taken for Dead

November 23, 2015
Readers with weak constitutions should be prepared for both stomach-churning violence and undistinguished prose in Masterton's clichéd fourth procedural starring Irish Det. Supt. Katie Maguire (after 2014's Red Light). The gross-outs begin in the very first chapter as a bride and groom find themselves unable to cut their wedding cake because there's something hard on the bottom layer. To their horror, they find a decomposing human head. Katie and her team quickly identify the victim as Micky Crounan, a missing baker, and soon they have more carnage to deal with. A sophisticated gang calling itself the High Kings of Erin has taken up kidnapping, and sends body parts as proof of abduction. The criminals' ability to know what Katie has planned leads her to suspect a leak from Cork City police headquarters. Masterton tosses in a superfluous side plot with several groan-worthy soap opera developments, as Katie becomes increasingly involved with her new neighbor, a veterinarian who hits his wife.

Starred review from December 15, 2015
Horrormeister Masterton is also a first-class crime novelist. This is his fourth Katie Maguire novel, starring a detective in the Cork, Ireland, police department. A mysterious bunch of people (exact number unknown) calling themselves the High Kings of Erin is abducting people, torturing them, holding them for ransom, and, in some cases, murdering them. A disembodied human head turns up in a wedding cake. A woman finds a jar full of her missing husband's teeth on her doorstep. A man and woman who help a man who apparently escaped from his kidnappers are brutally murdered (and, in this frightening scene, we can feel the author drawing on his horror background). Katie, under a professional cloud thanks to a botched high-profile case and facing the ire of an antagonistic boss, may be out of her depth here, but she won't let that stop her from taking her best shot to catch the sadists. Written with style and boasting a story that won't let you stop reading and characters who refuse to be held hostage by the plot, the novel is first-class thriller with some juicy horror touches. Mystery readers who don't know the Maguire novels should should change that right now.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)