Growing up, Caitlin Hendrix watched a killer destroy her father, Mack, a homicide detective with the Alameda, Calif., sheriff's department, in charge of the Prophet serial murder case. The Prophet consumed Mack's existence, costing him his marriage, his home, his sanity.
Twenty years later, Caitlin Hendrix is making a name for herself in the narcotics division of the Alameda Sheriff's Department when the notorious serial killer strikes again. Homicide Sergeant Joe Guthrie summons Caitlin to the grotesque scene where a woman lies dead, strangled with a bullwhip and left with the Prophet's calling card. Joe wants Caitlin on the investigation team because she's the only one with ties to her unstable father, now living in a boarding house and working as a day laborer. Regardless of Mack's questionable mental state, Joe knows he has valuable information about their unsub--unknown subject--locked inside him from long ago, and Caitlin's the one most likely to possess the key to that lock. What Joe doesn't realize is that Caitlin has more to offer the team than her familial connection to Mack Hendrix. She's a smart, driven woman, determined to serve and protect, as well as exact revenge for her father. But as the Prophet reels in Caitlin in the same way he did her father, her fate may turn out far worse.
In this break from her Jo Beckett and Evan Delaney series, Meg Gardiner (The Shadow Tracer) draws inspiration from the unsolved case of the Zodiac Killer that haunted northern California in the late 1960s. She keeps the suspense at peak levels throughout the novel. Those who worship at the altar of the thriller shall rejoice. The Prophet has arrived. --Jen Forbus, freelancer