Winter's End

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 17 NOV 2003

First novelist Rickards ventures tentatively into Thomas Harris territory with mixed results. Boston-based PI Alex Rourke, a former FBI agent who worked on profiling serial killers, gets dragged out of his routine by a murder in Winter's End, Maine, where he grew up. The local sheriff calls Rourke for help when his undermanned department is confronted with a puzzle a half-naked man was found crouching over a mutilated corpse with knives in his hands, but he refused to identify himself or explain what he was doing at the murder scene. The suspect does open up a little under Rourke's interrogation, but his cryptic responses suggest that he's playing with the detectives, and, more disturbingly, that he waited to be caught so that Rourke would become involved in the case. The clues reveal that the placid rural image of Winter's End is a facade, and that past sins have come back to haunt its leading citizens. While the book succeeds as an atmospheric page-turner, the taunting of the former profiler by an intelligent psychotic who seems to know many personal details is derivative of Hannibal Lecter's games-playing with his adversaries without offering anything new or interesting. Rickards even has his hero and an undeveloped love interest watch a Lecter movie on a date. The final payoff is disappointingly predictable, and the absence of a clever twist lessens the book's overall impact.