NB:- I've uploaded these before. Someone requested them & i seem to have deleted the originals. So here they are again. -felix56


Of all the rules a serial killer might choose to ignore, the costliest may be rolling through a red light within sight of a vigilant sheriff's deputy. But in Jonathan Nasaw's latest thriller, The Girls He Adored, that's exactly what he does. As the deputy tells it: "But when I look in, I see this blond girl, couldn't have been more than eighteen, she's sitting straight up holding her stomach with both hands. She's wearing a white sweater that looks like it's dyed in overlapping bands of red at the bottom, and she has the strangest expression on her face. Just, you know, puzzled--I'll never forget that expression. I ask her if she's okay, she lifts up her sweater with both hands, and her guts spill out on her lap."

A number of strawberry blondes have disappeared over the past 11 years. If rumpled FBI Special Agent E.L. Pender's correct, the unfortunate woman above is number 13. The good news is that "Casey" (after the gent with a passion for strawberry blondes from the song "And the Band Played On") is in custody, undergoing evaluation by court-appointed psychologist Irene Cogan.

The bad news is that before Pender can prove that Casey--or, given his dissociative identity disorder, Max, Christopher, Kinch, Lyssy, Alicia, et al-- is his man, the suspect breaks jail, gives Pender the slip, and takes Dr. Cogan on a hellish ride of psychosexual perversion. It ends on a nightmarish farm that could scare the pants off Dante.

How much Nasaw owes to Thomas Harris and his friend Hannibal Lecter is beside the point. In Casey/Max, Nasaw's crafted a true monstrosity; in Irene, a masterful adversary; in E.L. Pender, a cop as fine and likable as any you've met in some time. And he's wrapped them in a story like none you've lately read. --Michael Hudson



Injecting fresh potency into the phrase "scared to death," the wickedly talented author of "The Girls He Adored" has delivered a spine-chilling follow-up, introducing an unforgettable villain who confronts his victims with their phobias. The charmingly disheveled FBI Special Agent E.L. Pender is strapping on his nonregulation calfskin shoulder holster one last time on his last day on the job, showing the ropes to his eager successor, Investigative Specialist Linda Abruzzi. Then a letter from Dorie Bell arrives at FBI headquarters. Last year Dorie attended a phobia disorders convention in Las Vegas. Since then, three attendees have died under suspicious circumstances. A man with fear of heights jumped from the nineteenth floor of a building. A woman with fear of blood managed to cut her own wrists in the bathtub. A third victim with fear of suffocation was found in the bathtub, with a plastic bag over her head. "If you won't help us," Dorie begs Pender, "who will?" But it may already be too late: Dorie's friend Wayne Summers has now disappeared, too. Wayne's phobia is fear of birds. He's currently tied to a bed in a dark basement. And above his head, looms an enormous, starving barn owl. "Fear Itself" pits Agent Pender, one of the more endearing sleuths in recent fiction, against a man as immune to fear as he is fascinated by it. It's a duel that will jolt you time and time again and force you to confront the inevitable question: What is your greatest fear?



The brilliant author of "Fear Itself" pulls readers into an intricate web of ritual killings orchestrated by an evil pair of murderers who always manage to be one step ahead of the law. Former FBI Special Agent E.L. Pender may be retired, but he jumps at the chance to help solve a particularly gruesome series of crimes in the U.S. Virgin Islands. This is no ordinary case, seeing as the right hand on each body in the string of murders is missing. The police want to keep the existence of a serial killer under wraps; they hope to solve the crime before a stampede sets in. Meanwhile, Pender is convinced the killer must be the husband of the last victim and sets out to capture him -- but he's only partly right. The husband is connected to the case, but the real murderers are a cunning husband-and-wife team of archeologists who believe that if they breathe in their victim's last breath they will live forever. Never before has Pender come up against such savvy, diabolical opponents. From one trail of dead ends to another, readers will feel Pender's fever to prevent more murders from occurring...and his sheer panic when he can't. "Twenty-Seven Bones" is that most quintessential of thrilling reads, providing a visceral experience of chills and excitement on every page.



While novels featuring a love affair between the multiple personalities of two psychopathic serial killers are certainly rare, any points Nasaw might have earned for originality are canceled out by the improbable plot of this fourth E.L. Pender adventure (after 2004's Twenty-Seven Bones). British psychiatrist Alan Corder has spent years trying to cure Ulysses Maxwell, an in-patient at a prestigious Oregon treatment facility, of his murderous alternate identities. Maxwell, who's obviously clever enough to game the system, gets an unexpected ally when the attractive and deranged Lily DeVries arrives at the center. After Corder hosts the two killers at his house, they butcher him, his wife and their psychiatric attendants and make their escape. Soon ex-FBI series hero E.L. Pender and Dr. Irene Cogan, a psychiatrist who was kidnapped and tortured by Maxwell, take up the pursuit. Though Nasaw raises interesting questions about identity and sanity, his superficial answers leave this blood-soaked action yarn lacking genuine thrills or chills.



In his four previous novels of suspense, Jonathan Nasaw gave readers a charming and unlikely hero against the forces of evil in former FBI agent E.L. Pender. Now, in The Boys from Santa Cruz, Pender faces his most terrifying foe to date.

Like James Patterson and John Connolly, Jonathan Nasaw has proven time and again that he has an uncanny, almost eerie, knack for getting inside the labyrinthine and horrifying minds of the most deranged serial killers. In Fear Itself, Nasaw first introduced Pender, a rumpled, endearingly flawed investigator who immediately won readers’ hearts. In The Girls He Adored, Pender defeated a perverted psycho named Max, then went on to face The Machete Man in Twenty-Seven Bones, called a “skin-crawling, gory psycho-thriller” by the Scottish Daily Record. When last we left Pender, in Nasaw’s sexually charged thriller When She Was Bad, he took on a pair of mentally insane killers and nearly lost himself in the dark and blood-drenched recesses of their two twisted psyches.

With his lust for terror and a frightening talent for getting deep under his readers’ skins, Nasaw promises to deliver more gripping action and unimaginably gruesome detail as he introduces readers to the bloodthirsty The Boys from Santa Cruz.