VIDEO KILL

Rating:
Summary: "A maniac is taping Hollywood's starlets--"
Review: "--And they're dying for the role..."

Set in Los Angeles, California, "Video Kill" follows Erik Neilsen and Tony Rocca, a Hollywood writing team trying to sell their movie script about "a psychopath who videotape[s] his victims as he murder[s] them", but with no luck. That is, until almost a year later when a handful of actresses are murdered one by one, similar to how Erik and Tony had written. Now the two writers are called in to create a screenplay based on the Video Killer's movie-remaking murders, a la Alfred Hitchcock style (eg, "Frenzy," "Rear Window," etc.).

Despite the "Psycho"-like front cover of a naked dead girl in a bathtub, the murder scenes aren't very graphic or sexualized, which non-horror readers might appreciate. It was a fast read, though (I finished it in a couple days), but it wasn't as suspenseful as I'd hoped. The red herrings weren't very believable for one, and I guessed the killer partway through, mainly due to his/her work history and aversion to blood. The suspense near the end was kind of ruined for me, too, when his/her identity was revealed a little too soon. Still, this being my first Joanne Fluke book, I look forward to reading more by her. Along with several other horror novels published by Pocket Books in the '80s, this one was pretty enjoyable.