Gray Matter
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
The riveting first entry in the acclaimed PJ Gray series, in which a police psychologist uses virtual reality forensics to solve a vicious series of homicides
Penelope Jennifer "PJ" Gray is a recently divorced single mother living in St. Louis—and a psychologist turned cyber-profiler who heads the police force's Computerized Homicide Investigations Project. By using virtual reality technology, Gray is able to get inside the heads of killers and reconstruct their crimes.
The action begins when a talented pianist is savagely murdered, his back carved with a drawing of a dog, his head missing. As similar deaths follow, Gray and her partner—an old-school, technophobe detective named Leo Schultz—must use their skills to trace the serial murderer. Gray Matter marks a brilliant crime-writing debut, as this electrifying story recalls Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Of all the conflicts that drive Kennett's mercurial debut, none is more compelling than that between the very modern virtual-reality program designed to recreate a murder from the killer's point of view and the very primitive serial killer who calls himself Dog and who thinks that eating the brains of his victims will give him their special talents. In parallel fashion, Kennett's two protagonists also represent the new and the old: recently divorced computer expert Penelope Jessica ("PJ") Gray, working the freshly authorized Computerized Homicide Investigations Project in St. Louis, and leathery Detective Leo Schultz, who is having problems at home and is wary of anything digital. PJ also has a modern, i.e., smart-mouthed, son, who alternates between asking his mother to stop the mushy stuff and accusing her of sleeping with the first man she meets. The narrative can feel disjointed at times, and sometimes seems no more than a springboard to launch a pair of franchise characters. But eventually Kennett's storytelling talent wins out, so that even as PJ and Schultz are tracking Dog (with a little help from the FBI), the killer--with the voices of his victims competing for attention inside his head--is tracking them. At times shaky, at times fractured, this debut ultimately coheres into solid entertainment.
