Nightlife

September 26, 2005
Serial killer Charlene Buckner—aka Tanya Starling, Rachel Sturbridge, Nancy Mills, and several other monikers—changes her identity each time she commits a murder. By the end of Perry's mesmerizing novel (Pursuit
; The Butcher's Boy
), Charlene has racked up an impressive body count and her own personal Rolodex of bogus names. Yes, as a child she had a slutty mom, and yes, she was abandoned in her late teens, but her life story is hardly the horror show of most fictional serial killers. Perry patiently shows that it doesn't necessarily take child molestation and brutality to create a murderer. "She was just a regular person who had always wanted what everybody else wanted—to be happy." Portland police detective Sgt. Catherine Hobbes investigates Charlene's first kill, Dennis Poole, and follows close behind her, always just a little too late to catch Charlene or save her latest victim, as Charlene moves on to San Francisco, L.A., Las Vegas and other locales, where she pauses just long enough to commit another murder. Hobbes has her own issues, and by the end the two women have grown close not only in proximity but in identity as well. Reinterpreting conventions and confounding readers' expectations with fascinating characters, this is Perry at his best.

December 1, 2005
The creator of comic thrillers such as "Metzger's Dog" and the disappearing acts in the Jane Whitefield series returns with his 14th novel, a brutal though somewhat hollow tale of a serial killer. In contrast to most serial killers, Tanya Starling is a woman, and she has no signature MO except that most of her corpses are male. The victim of her mother's emotional abuse and men's abandonment, Tanya takes on and sheds identities and hair color willy-nilly as she moves from man to man, becoming stronger with each murder. Her nemesis is another relentless woman, Portland detective Catherine Hobbes, who tracks her to LA and back and nearly becomes a victim herself. The novel veers back and forth between Tanya and Catherine, with occasional side trips to Joe Pitt, a former police investigator, now private, who provides the romance in Catherine's dull personal life. The characters never really come to life, however, and the plotline itself has a static quality despite the identity and venue changes. Disappointing. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ "11/1/05.]" -Francine Fialkoff, Library Journal"

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2005
Perry, whose many thrillers have won numerous awards, including an Edgar for " The Butcher's Boy " (1982), returns with another nail-biter. The center of interest for Portland Homicide is a female serial killer, whom the reader sees in chapters devoted to her as a shape-shifter and a highly skilled manipulator of men and situations. The police catch on to the tip of this iceberg woman when the cousin of an L.A. Mob figure is found shot to death in his home in Portland--two blond hairs matching his girlfriend's are left at the scene. Portland homicide detective Catherine Hobbes uneasily accepts the help of an L.A. private eye known for both his expertise and his arrogance. This novel's intensity comes from the skillful way in which Perry lets readers in on the secrets of the serial killer: we see her change disguises and identities; we see her pick up and destroy men. We see more than the police and the private eye do, as they try to find the woman they suspect killed the Portland man, and as we see her leave that old identity far, far behind. Perry also offers a complex character in detective Catherine Hobbes as she races against the private eye to catch a protean killer. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)