The Girls He Adored

January 1, 2001
The homage to Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs is perhaps a bit too heavy-handed, but readers should get their bloodmoney's worth out of this twisted tale of a serial killer with a taste for strawberry blondes. "The system of identities known collectively as Ulysses Christopher Maxwell Jr." contains: a mnemonics expert, a petulant child, an extremely seductive young man, a demonic killer and a frighteningly smart front man named Max. It was Max who was finally arrested in California's Monterey County, sitting next to the recently disemboweled body of a young woman, during a routine traffic stop. Dr. Irene Cogan, an expert in what is now called DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) because "multiple personality disorder" got a bad name, finds Max a real challengeDand just a bit of a turn-on. For veteran FBI agent E.L. Pender, two years away from mandatory retirement and once voted the worst-dressed agent in the bureau, Max might mean the end of a one-man crusade to convince the world that all those strawberry blondes who mysteriously disappeared over the last 10 years were the victims of a serial killer Pender calls Casey, after the old song "And the Band Played On." When Max uses his Lecter-like skills to break out of jail and kidnap Dr. Cogan, Pender trails them to a horrific farm called Scorned Ridge in Oregon. Thanks largely to Nasaw's sharp writing, familiarity breeds not contempt but interest in how it all comes out.