Book Review: Split Second

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

Split Second     Amazon US PB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada PB Amazon Canada HC
Alex Kava
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Serial Killer   Police Procedural   FBI
Series: Maggie O'Dell # 2
Mira, Aug 2001, $22.95, 408 pp.

They nicknamed him the Collector because Albert Stuckey captured his victims and slowly tortured and raped them over a period of months in ways too horrible to imagine. Eventually he broke their will to live before killing them. Top FBI profiler Maggie O’Dell spent two years profiling Stuckey before she could help bring him down and see him locked away.

During a transfer to a maximum-security prison, Stuckey frees himself and kills two armed escorts before vanishing. When the FBI learns about the Collector’s escape, they remove Maggie from the field and reassign her to a teaching position. However when acquaintances of Maggie are murdered with an M.O. identical to that of Stuckey, she is placed in charge of the case in the hopes that lightning strikes twice. If she fails she knows she will be better off dead.

SPLIT SECOND centers on the obsessive behavior of the heroine and the villain especially towards one another because both are not just determined, they need to bring their opponent down. Thus readers have a front row seat to the ultimate cat and mouse game in which the person playing the feline seems to change with every twist of the plot. Alex Kava fills her psychological thriller with plenty of action as well, but it is her characters whose motivations are quite understandable and moves the audience. SPLIT SECOND is one book that would be a crime for sub-genre fans to miss.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner

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