Incendiary Designs
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
With "terse prose," this "fascinating" entry in the award-winning series pits psychiatrist Jack Caleb and cop John Thinnes against a serial arsonist (Library Journal).
While jogging through Chicago's Lincoln Park at dawn, Dr. Jack Caleb comes upon a scene of horror—a mob in white robes about to set a police car on fire with the officer inside. Caleb's training as a medic in the Vietnam War kicks in and he rushes to rescue the man. One cop is saved, but later his female partner is found in another location, stoned to death. Homicide detective John Thinnes has a cop killer on his hands.
But these two attacks are only the beginning in a series of arson fires and murders over the course of a long, hot, deadly summer. Evidence points toward cultists in the Church of Divine Conflagration—but then some of them also fall victim to the pyromaniac. When a physician friend of Caleb is implicated, the psychiatrist works with Thinnes to set a trap for the killer—but it's one they might not escape unscorched themselves . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chicago homicide detective John Thinnes and gay psychiatrist Dr. Jack Caleb, the unlikely and slightly mismatched stars of Dymmoch's well-received The Man Who Understood Cats and The Death of Blue Mountain Cat, continue their somewhat uneasy alliance in this third installment. The solid, sometimes tedious but always believable details of Thinnes's investigation of a series of arson murders serve as ballast for some heavy coincidences that ground the plot line. The first of these is used to connect the pair and describes Caleb's heroics when, jogging in Lincoln Park one morning and coming upon a band of cultists trying to burn a cop car, he fends them off long enough to pull out the cop who has been locked inside. Thinnes is put on the case. Another obviously convenient twist is Caleb's developing relationship with a man who becomes one of the suspects in an arson-for-hire scheme. Murders proliferate as the investigation intensifies; all the while Dymmoch weaves a compelling tapestry of various Chicago neighborhoods and their cultures. In the end, the pace of the plotting, the absorbing action scenes and the appeal of most of the cast compensate for the handy serendipities.
