Say Goodbye

In a world in which scores of authors are trying to scare your socks off--and rarely succeeding even when they entertain--this is a rarity: a truly disturbing thriller. Genre: serial killer. Subgenre: with creepy fetish. Our man here is obsessed with spiders, and that's one of his more human qualities. Narrator Ann Marie Lee is exceptional in creating the voices on the normal side of the ledger, of terrified victims--of no-nonsense nonagenarian Rita; of our heroine, tough FBI agent Kimberly Quincy. Lee uses accents expertly and plays a range from courage to agony as if feelings were harp strings. Lincoln Hoppe is equally effective handling the voices of the victims and the creeps, though it's a less palatable task. Strongly recommended, but listen in daylight. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

May 5, 2008
In bestseller Gardner’s engaging if highly disturbing 10th thriller, Delilah Rose is a Georgia prostitute familiar with pregnant FBI Special Agent Kimberly Quincy (“beautiful, brainy, and pedigreed”) through Kimberly’s well-publicized nabbing of the Eco-Killer in The Killing Hour
(2003). Delilah asks the detective to investigate her friend Ginny Jones’s possible abduction by a creepy-crawly john who calls himself Dinchara, an anagram of “arachnid.” Delilah, however, turns out not to be who she claims she is, and her ties to the spider-obsessed killer are more complicated than she’ll admit. As the missing persons count rises, some readers may have trouble keeping track of the time sequence amid the shifting points-of-view. Still, Gardner delivers a satisfying resolution in line with what her fans have come to expect: a suspenseful freak show wrapped up with a neatly tied bow.