Geiger isn't necessarily a guy you want to root for. He specializes in "information retrieval," otherwise known as torture, and he'll do just about anything as long as someone pays--until a client brings in 12-year-old Ezra Matheson.
With Ezra's arrival, Geiger begins to doubt himself and his job. He begins having flashbacks of his own childhood, which was traumatic enough that he'd blocked it out until now, and makes it his mission to find out why grown men would want to torture a preadolescent boy--and to save him from that fate, possibly at his own peril.
Although The Inquisitor is Smith's first novel, he worked for several years in both movies and TV as a screenwriter, investigative news producer and documentary filmmaker. He knows how to thrill, tossing mystery and suspense in between well-researched, spine-chillingly descriptive torture scenes. In Geiger's world, characters carry loaded guns and smoke cigarettes, because they know they won't live long enough to get lung cancer, and his turnabout in character becomes the novel's driving force. Smith skillfully depicts a monster becoming a man as the ghosts of his past become the developing factors of his present. Will Geiger one day be able to live a normal life? Only the inquisitor knows. --Sara Dobie Bauer, blogger at Wordpress