A troubled Mary Ann Walker takes a nosedive off a bridge. Seattle's police department macho man John LaMoia takes the call, along with the beauteous cop psychologist Daphne Matthews. They suspect her boyfriend, known to beat Mary Ann. Her seething brother, Ferrell, is convinced the boyfriend did the deed. But the case somehow becomes too slippery to close.

Lou Boldt, the supervising officer, is entangled in a conundrum of his own: two women have disappeared and a road crew worker's death may have a connection to the missing women. A peeper who's photographing undressed women at tourist hotels becomes Boldt's best suspect, along with a man who is stalking and terrifying Daphne.

As both cases heat up, so does the sexual tension between Matthews and LaMoia leading them both into unknown emotional territory. A hair-raising chase through Seattle's Underground, a little-known network of hundred-year-old streets that were paved over by the city decades ago, brings the story to its white-knuckle climax.

Beginning with Mary Ann Walker's jump off a Seattle Bridge, then turning to the investigation of two missing women, a murdered road crew worker, and a peeping tom, this police procedural tells a complex tale. As the police follow leads, the killers leave a multitude of false clues in an attempt to confuse the detectives. Chilling murders and creepy midnight stalkings, described in Pearson's own relentless gravelly voice, add to the story. Pearson reads in a slow, even voice that dips to inaudibility at the end of sentences. Nevertheless, his captivating story never ceases to disturb. M.B.K. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

 

Ridley Pearson is the award-winning coauthor, along with Dave Barry, of Peter and the Starcatchers, Peter and the Shadow Thieves, and Peter and the Secret of Rundoon. He has also written more than twenty best-selling novels, including Killer Weekend, and the young-adult fantasy The Kingdom Keepers. He was the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction at Oxford University.