Description:
If you haven't read Eyes, Joseph Glass's first Susan Shader novel, Blood will certainly send you in search of it. A psychiatrist and criminal profiler, Shader is also a gifted psychic who's put more than one murderer away. In this chilling suspense thriller focusing on the search for a serial killer who preys on young women, she employs both her psychic abilities and her extensive psychiatric training to create a horrific portrait of the murderer, whose bizarre rituals quickly earn him the sobriquet the Undertaker. Yet Shader is stumped in her efforts to identify him. Unable to decipher the distorted messages whose themes of abortion, virginity, communion, blood, and one particular Shakespearean tragedy seem to be tied into the murders, Shader partners with David Gold, a Chicago detective who believes in her psychic powers as well as her professional talents, and Meredith Spier, a television journalist who has been contacted by the Undertaker and may be his next intended victim. One bad hunch destroys Shader's credibility with the police department. By the time she convinces Gold that she's decoded the psychic clues that can lead him to the killer, the Undertaker has Meredith in his clutches, and the grisly scene that sets up the denouement seems almost anticlimactic. In fact, greater danger awaits, from an escaped killer who's got a grudge against the good doctor, and acts on it in a coda that's a real heartbreaker. Forensic psychiatrists and criminal profilers aren't new in the mystery suspense genre; every police force seems to have one these days. But Susan Shader also has a private practice, and sitting in on her sessions with her own patients is what sets Blood apart from the field. In her work with one of them, an unhappy young woman named Wendy Breckinridge, Shader's real talents as a healer and therapist are brilliantly illuminated. For readers with a particular interest in psychiatry, the true mystery will be how to find a counselor with Shader's special gifts. --Jane Adams
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