Beyond Recognition PDF
Preview Beyond Recognition
There’s a homicidal arsonist loose in Seattle. Single mothers are being killed in fires that burn hotter than experts have ever seen. Somehow, the children are spared. Why?
For Seattle Police Sergeant Lou Boldt and the department’s psychologist, Daphne Matthews, the High Temperature Accelerant fires challenge their every resource. The fuel used in these deadly fires is as much a mystery as the identity of the arsonist who sets them.
A Seattle fire marshal reveals to Boldt that ominous quotations have been sent to him before each of the fires. Is the fire marshal, whose past is suddenly in question, more involved than anyone wants to believe?
Based on two years of research that included interviews with firefighters, tours of secret government labs, and the help of an Apollo astronaut, Beyond Recognition combines Ridley Pearson’s signature use of high-tech forensics with breathless pacing and complex characters to bring to the page a most compelling, challenging, and satisfying novel.
Amazon.com ReviewRidley Pearson manages to make high-tech crime-fighting more human and fascinating than anyone else in the field--witness such bestsellers as Chain of Evidence. Once again, Sgt. Lou Boldt, inspired and seemingly tireless forensic investigator for the Seattle police, zigs from the lab to the field--this time to find out why single mothers are being burned to death by flash fires fueled by an unknown, amazingly volatile fuel. The chief villain might remind you of recent headlines, but Pearson's research and writing skills create fiction more interesting than fact.
From Publishers WeeklyA rag and a bone are literally all the Seattle PD has to work with after a violent fire consumes a home and its helpless female occupant, a divorced mother. When a second victim dies the same way, detective Lou Boldt (Chain of Evidence, etc.) and police psychologist Daphne Matthews (both Pearson regulars) begin the process of profiling a serial killer who uses rocket fuel to torch women because they resemble his mother. Elsewhere, a young boy named Ben, whose abusive stepfather has all but driven him into the street, has been befriended by a fraudulent "psychic" named Emily Richland, who hires Ben to scout her clients' vehicles while they're meeting with her. This task leads, in the novel's best scene, to Ben witnessing an exchange of cash for rocket fuel, a sighting that in turn eventually takes the police to their killer. Much of the plot teeters on the coincidental nature of all these connections, and on the unlikely bits of evidence used to corner the suspect (e.g., a ladder's impressions left on backyard grass). The intricate forensics that have driven so many of Pearson's novels are largely missing here, and secondary characters are sketched quickly and without depth. Even Boldt and Matthews have lost their shine, bickering a lot while insisting that they love one another, while Boldt's long-suffering wife, Liz, is discarded in cruel fashion. But no doubt the Boldt-Matthews team will be back, hopefully to solve cases less confusing and farfetched than this one. Major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The list of books you might like
