The Angel Maker (Boldt and Matthews Series #2)

by Ridley Pearson

Overview

Urban legend, or frightening fact? "One of the better fictional detectives ever penned," Seattle's Lou Boldt, and forensic psychologist Dephne Matthews suspect illegal organ harvesting is behind recent assaults on teenage runaways. The trail leads them down dark streets and darker corners of the mind, as they find themselves pursuing a twisted surgeon with his own ideas of mortality and social justice.

Packed with action, The Angel Maker takes the reader on a joy ride from Seattle's homeless to an abandoned homesteading cabin and kennel hidden away in the forests of the Northwest. Daphne Matthews, intent on rescuing a teenage runaway from the madman's scalpel, puts her own life on the line, finding herself face to face with the Angel Maker.

"Award-winning author Ridley Pearson carves out and serves up a thriller that will make you look twice at your local veterinarian." -- Book Magazine

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781401305130
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	08/14/2012
Series:	Boldt and Matthews Series , #2
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	37,672
File size:	573 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ridley Pearson is the award-winning co-author, along with Dave Barry, of Peter and the Starcatchers, Peter and the Shadow Thieves, Peter and the Secret of Rundoon, Peter and the Sword of Mercy, Escape From the Carnivale, Cave of the Dark Wind, Blood Tide, and Science Fair. In addition to Kingdom Keepers: Disney After Dark, Kingdom Keepers: Disney at Dawn, Kingdom Keepers: Disney in Shadow, and Kingdom Keepers: Power Play, he is also the author of the young adult thrillers Steel Trapp: The Challenge and Steel Trapp: The Academy. He has written more than twenty best-selling crime novels, including Killer View and Killer Weekend. He was the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction at Oxford University.

Hometown:

St. Louis, Missouri

Date of Birth:

March 13, 1953

Place of Birth:

Glen Cove, New York

Education:

Kansas University, B.A., Brown University

Website:

http://www.ridleypearson.com/

Editorial Reviews

In his latest forensic suspense thriller, Pearson ( Probable Cause ) brings maverick Seattle police sergeant Lou Boldt out of early retirement to help solve an especially gruesome crime: the black market ``harvesting'' of human organs. Police psychologist Daphne Matthews, volunteering at a shelter for runaways and drug abusers, sees 16-year-old Cindy Chapman stagger in one night, dazed and hemorrhaging from just-completed surgery. Perplexed to discover that no hospital has any record of the teen, Daphne contacts her ex-partner (and onetime lover) Lou, who now spends his days caring for his baby boy and playing jazz piano at a local club. The grisly evidence suggests that someone has stolen Cindy's kidney and used electroshock to erase her memory. Lou is lured back to his old job, and he discovers with Daphne three other cases of runaways who died after botched surgery, with evidence pointing to a ``harvester'' who uses veterinary techniques. The two must race to catch this medical monster before he makes his next fatal extraction. Pearson's engaging forensic detail--he makes complicated, potentially disgusting facts almost entertaining--and brisk prose will have readers racing to the cliffhanger climax. Literary Guild selection. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Potent blend of medical thriller and police procedural that resurrects the cop-hero of Pearson's Undercurrents (1988) and pits him against—of all things—a maniacal veterinarian. Lou Boldt has been off the Seattle force for two years, tending his infant son and playing jazz piano at a local dive, but his extraordinary empathy for murder victims won't let him refuse the request of police shrink and ex-lover Daphne Matthews (whose throat was slashed in Undercurrents) to help with her new case—a series of street kids found dead and missing a kidney, liver, or lung. Immediately suspecting that a transplant surgeon is "harvesting" the organs and selling them at great profit, Boldt rejoins the SPD and pushes for advice from the medical examiner (the narrative bristles with the sort of forensic detail that informed Undercurrents). Meanwhile, Pearson bares his villain—sociopathic society vet Elden Tegg—as we see him snatching social-worker Sharon Shaffer with an eye to selling her heart to a mobster whose wife is dying from heart disease. Unlike Undercurrents, then, where suspense derived from "whodunit," the tension here is strictly—and tightly—time-wound: Can Boldt i.d. the killer and rescue Sharon—or can Sharon herself escape from the remote dog kennel where Tegg's imprisoned her, naked and terrified—before the vet wields his scalpel? Thriller fans will note that this setup strongly echoes Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs—but Pearson matches Harris's pace as the hours tick down, marking off twists (a hiker chancing on the kennel) and hot suspense sequences (a pawnshop sting to break into Tegg's computer) until the cathartic, brutalclimax. Exceptionally gripping and full of amazing forensic lore (e.g., that Band-Aids emit low-level radioactivity from being sterilized): a top-flight offering from an author who's clearly found his groove.

Kirkus Reviews