Just Jennifer

The Killing Lessons by Saul Black (St. Martin’s Press)

When two men enter Rowena Cooper’s house in Colorado she fears not only for herself but for her two children also in the house.  As she lays dying, she entreats her daughter Nell to run away as fast and as far as she can though Rowena knows the odds are against Nell as the nearest house is a mile away and one of the men has seen her.  Hundreds of miles of away, San Francisco homicide detective Valerie Hart is still struggling with demons from a case three years ago and the detritus that is now her life.  Val is also following a trail of killers who rape, torture and kill women leaving random objects somewhere inside of the women, all disparate objects that seem to have no rhyme or reason to them, though in her gut, Val feels they are the key to the murders.  Working almost obsessively, Val examines each piece of evidence over and over until she recognizes something and a pattern emerges, one that still doesn’t make sense to Val, but puts her closer to a killer.  Val also must deal with and sort out her feelings for Special Agent Nick Blaskowitch, her lover three years ago when she allowed her life to fall apart.  Also new to the team is another special agent, Carla, who seems to have it out for Val from the start, though Val can’t figure out why.  Val carefully works her way through the tangles that are her case and her life, ohping she can solve one and straighten out the other, all the while a little girl fights to be rescued. 

This multi-layered thriller grabs hold of you from the first page and though it seems to ease up at times, the urgent tension is always in the background waiting to leap off the pages.  Black’s characters are all damaged and some fighting for what each feels is normalcy, while others are content to let life happen to them.  The plot is twisty and creepy enough that as quickly as the aha moments come, they slip out of grasp until the entire picture is revealed.  A slightly rushed ending leaves the reader a little let down, but the final scene between Val and Nick offers hope that Black will return to these characters.