Menaced Assassin
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- £2.49
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- £2.49
Publisher Description
It began with the murder of a beautiful woman, the adulterous wife of a mild-mannered professor. Then a corrupt cop was gunned down in a phone booth.
After that, the killer who called himself Raptor moved through a list of players, playboys and mobsters from Palm Springs to Minnesota. With each hit came a phone call to San Francisco organised crime investigator Dante Stagnoro, and a disguised, taunting voice daring Stagnoro to stop him. Raptor is a killer like no other Stagnoro has ever pursued.
And the final truth of his death trip - a truth about man, nature and God - will not be revealed until the last victim is claimed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mystery veteran Gores (Dead Man; 32 Cadillacs) claims psycho-thriller territory with this risk-taking, rewarding crime novel. After linking her boss and lover to organized crime, film-company exec Molly Dalton is killed in what looks like a mob execution. Her husband, Will, a paleoanthropologist, loses himself in his work, studying violence and sexuality in apes. As more professional-style murders occur, San Francisco cop Dante Stagnoro, in charge of SFPD's organized crime unit, suspects that Will, perhaps being privy to Molly's information, may be another mob target, even though someone calling himself ``Raptor'' is claiming the kills in disingenuous, macabre phone messages. Drawing on a variety of conventions and styles, from the procedural to the gothic, Gores wedges a passionate lecture on evolution into a taut investigation and waxes ornate in the Raptor's chilling and vivid reveries. A professional killer from New Jersey is the likely suspect for a few of the hits, but the real criminal mind is extremely well hidden, right to the end, when few of the hoods are still standing. In his latest, Gores demonstrates masterful narrative sleight-of-hand.
