The Twenty
A Thriller
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4.1 • 22 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A relentless serial killer thriller loosely based on the real-life Smiley Face Killer—for fans of Harlan Coben crime thrillers and the blood-curdling fiction of Thomas Harris!
“Some authors spook you. Some authors unnerve me. Very few authors frighten you—but very few authors are Sam Holland.” —AJ Finn, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Woman in the Window
When DCI Adam Bishop arrives at the crime scene in the dead of night, the sight of the body is bad enough—but what Adam notices next chills him to his core. More bodies surface. And the spray-painted numbers daubed above the corpses reveal the horrific truth: the killer is counting down. But to what end?
Adam has no idea—until Dr. Romilly Cole knocks on his door with damning evidence pointing to a series of murders twenty five years earlier—a case she knows intimately from her past. Now, it’s personal—and the next knock on his door could be fatal.
Sam Holland’s gripping debut novel, The Echo Man, riveted readers and critics alike with its raw and brutal depiction of the unthinkable depredations of a serial killer. With The Twenty, Holland kicks her depraved milieu into even higher gear with another up-all-night serial killer thriller that will leave readers breathless.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Holland's second serial killer whodunit, after 2022's The Echo Man, pales in comparison to that impressive debut. After a corpse is found at an abandoned construction site, too damaged by the elements to identify, Hampshire Det. Chief Insp. Adam Bishop is called in to investigate. Bishop spots the characters "XII" in green spray paint at the scene, and a search of the area uncovers more bodies and more Roman numerals, suggesting the work of a killer keeping count of his victims. Then Bishop's ex-wife, Romilly Cole, approaches him with a lead: decades earlier, when Romilly was 11, she unlocked her family's off-limits outhouse to find that her father, Elijah Cole, had used the building to confine multiple women, whom he raped, tortured, and killed. Though Elijah's been locked up ever since, Romilly is convinced he had a hand in the new murders, and Bishop fears the next victim could be extremely close to home. Holland is better at generating momentary tension than sensibly moving the story forward or ushering it to a satisfying conclusion. The result is intermittently exciting but largely unsatisfying.
