This thriller has just the right mix of suspense, intrigue, and murder, topped off with a little romance to make it sizzle. Pierce Quincy, hard-boiled FBI agent, and Rainie Conner, ex-cop turned P.I., team up to catch the perpetrator of several ingenious murders. The psychopath staged the death of Quincy 's daughter Amanda, then his ex-wife, and is now going after Quincy 's remaining daughter, Kimberly. Kate Burton's ingenious narration pits sweet women and tough cops against stone cold psychopathic killer. Burton keeps up the heat as she seamlessly switches from romance to murder and back again, taunting the listener with every twist of the plot while Gardner dares you to guess the killer's identity and motives before Conner and Quincy do. *** Gardner brings back the quirky team of FBI supervisory special agent Pierce Quincy and Portland private eye Rainie Conner in a fiendishly well choreographed dance of death. The reader knows from the outset (a seduction scene ending in vehicular homicide) that someone has set out to systematically murder FBI profiler Quincy's loved ones. The question is not why, since Quincy has tracked down many killers, but who. Specifically, who would have the resources of time, money, and psychological acumen to devise and carry out such a sadistic campaign? After the first death, Quincy calls upon Conner to investigate; the plot moves to the clock of the killer's agenda. The weak points of Gardner 's writing are his dialogue and characterization: Conner's overly snappy banter and her hardbitten personality are both overdone. But Gardner knows procedure, FBI behavioral science, and the details of such newly minted crimes as identity theft. Not deep but harrowing. Connie Fletcher

From Publishers Weekly A cold case grows hot again in Gardner 's sixth high-octane page-turner, a romantic thriller that features rookie FBI agent Kimberly Quincy. Kimberly is the daughter of Pierce Quincy, former FBI profiler turned PI, last seen in The Next Accident. She's a tough, troubled young woman still recovering from the murders of her mother and sister six years earlier. During week nine of the FBI Academy 's 16-week training program in Virginia, she discovers the body of a young woman who looks like her late sister. Since the corpse has been dumped on a secured Marine base, the Naval Criminal Investigation Service is in charge, but determined Kimberly soon takes a leave of absence so she can team up with Michael "Mac" McCormack, visiting Georgia Bureau of Investigations Special Agent, along with her father and his partner, Rainie Connor, to prevent another death. Mac receives taunting mail and cell phone messages ("planet dying… animals weeping… rivers screaming… can't you hear it? Heat kills") that lead him to suspect a serial eco-killer who last struck in Georgia three years earlier, leaving seven dead women and one survivor. Sparks fly between Kimberly and Mac as they rush to rescue the eco-killer's latest victim, Tina Krahn. Gardner offers riveting glimpses of Tina's struggle to survive in an environmentally hazardous locale. With tight plotting, an ear for forensic detail and a dash of romance, this is a truly satisfying sizzler in the tradition of Tess Gerritsen and Tami Hoag. From Booklist It has been a while since a vicious murderer killed Kimberly Quincy's mother and sister and put a gun to Kimberly's own head, but rage and guilt are Kim's constant companions, isolating her even as they toughen her in the struggle to become an FBI agent. After she literally stumbles on the body of a woman who looks very like her dead sister, her tightly controlled emotions spill into a furious search for a serial killer that compromises her career. In concert with an equally dedicated (and attractive) Georgia law enforcement officer, her estranged father (a former FBI profiler), and a handful of forensics specialists, she pursues clues to solve a deadly game, the prize for which is a kidnapped young woman. The forensic detail is great, and Gardner works in some genuinely creepy moments, especially when she zeroes in on the victim struggling against horrific odds. A tighter focus and a trimmed-down cast of characters would have made the reading smoother, but that won't stop Gardner 's fans. Stephanie Zvirin

A terrifying woman-in-jeopardy plot propels Gardner's latest thriller, in which child advocate and PI Lorraine "Rainie" Conner's fate hangs in the balance. Rainie, a recovering alcoholic with a painful past (who previously appeared in Gardner's The Third Victim, The Next Accident and The Killing Hour) is kidnapped from her parked car one night in coastal Oregon. The key players converge on the town of Bakersville to solve the mystery of her disappearance: Rainie's husband, Quincy, a semiretired FBI profiler whose anguish over Rainie undercuts his high-level experience with kidnappers; Quincy's daughter, Kimberley, a rising star in the FBI who flies in from Atlanta; Oregon State Police Sgt. Det. Carlton Kincaid; local sheriff Shelly Atkins; and abrasive federal agent Candi Rodriguez, who specializes in hostage negotiation. Gardner suspensefully intercuts the complicated maneuvering of this bickering team with graphic scenes of Rainie bravely struggling with her violent, sadistic captor. When the rescuers make a misstep, he raises the stakes by snatching a troubled seven-year-old foster child named Dougie, who's one of Rainie's cases. The cat-and-mouse intensifies, as does the mystery of the kidnapper's identity. Sympathetic characters, a strong sense of place and terrific plotting distinguish Gardner's new thriller. *** When someone you love vanishes without a trace, how far would you go to get them back? For ex-FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, it's the beginning of his worst nightmare: a car abandoned on a desolate stretch of Oregon highway, engine running, purse on the driver's seat. And his estranged wife, Rainie Conner, gone, leaving no clue to her fate. Did one of the ghosts from her troubled past finally catch up with Rainie? Or could her disappearance be the result of one of the cases they'd been working-a particularly vicious double homicide or the possible abuse of a deeply disturbed child Rainie took too close to heart? Together with his daughter, FBI agent Kimberly Quincy, Pierce is battling the local authorities, racing against time and frantically searching for answers to all the questions he's been afraid to ask. One man knows what happened that night. Adopting the moniker from an eighty-year old murder, he has already contacted the press. His terms are clear: he wants money, he wants power, he wants celebrity. And if he doesn't get what he wants, Rainie will be gone for good. Sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, it's still not enough. As the clock winds down on a terrifying deadline, Pierce plunges headlong into the most desperate hunt of his life, into the shattering search for a killer, a lethal truth, and for the love of his life who may forever be.gone

Lisa Gardner, the New York Times bestselling author of Hide and Gone, draws us into the venomous mind games of her most terrifying killer yet. Come into my parlor… For Kimberly Quincy, FBI Special Agent, it all starts with a pregnant hooker. The story Delilah Rose tells Kimberly about her johns is too horrifying to be true-but prostitutes are disappearing, one by one, with no explanation, and no one but Kimberly seems to care. Said the spider to the fly… As a member of the Evidence Response Team, dead hookers aren’t exactly Kimberly’s specialty. The young agent is five months pregnant-she has other things to worry about than an alleged lunatic who uses spiders to do his dirty work. But Kimberly’s own mother and sister were victims of a serial killer. And now, without any bodies and with precious few clues, it’s all too clear that a serial killer has found the key to the perfect murder… or Kimberly is chasing a crime that never happened. Kimberly’s caught in a web more lethal than any spider’s, and the more she fights for answers, the more tightly she’s trapped. What she doesn’t know is that she’s close-too close-to a psychopath who makes women’s nightmares come alive, and if he has his twisted way, it won’t be long before it’s time for Kimberly to…