Review Excerpt:

With this debut thriller, Ellison puts her mentoring by Lee Child to good use. A serial killer named the Southern Strangler is making the rounds of several Southern states, and it’s up to Nashville homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson and her lover, FBI profiler Dr. John Baldwin, to stop him. Already on the case, John is joined by Taylor when the latest victim is found in Nashville and another young woman disappears. Though the investigation starts slowly, Ellison does a nice job of laying the groundwork and creating suspense. Equally well done are the refreshingly realistic procedural details. Taylor and John, plus a host of other characters, have their jobs to do, and they stick to them: Taylor, for instance, doesn’t dump her job in Nashville to chase the killer from state to state—she investigates what she can, using the tools that are hers; John does the same. For popular fiction collections. [Ellison has a short story appearing in the forthcoming anthology Killer Year: Stories To Die For…From the Hottest New Crime Writers, edited by Lee Child (Minotaur, January 2008).—Ed.]—Jane Jorgenson, Madison P.L., WI