The Dark Corners of the Night

December 23, 2019
Edgar-winner Gardiner stumbles in her derivative third thriller starring FBI agent Caitlin Hendrix (after 2018’s Into the Black Nowhere). In Los Angeles, someone is targeting couples with children in their homes, fatally shooting the adults while leaving the traumatized children alive. The LAPD calls in the FBI, and the emotionally damaged Hendrix, who has a cutting disorder, becomes part of the team hoping to catch the murderer, who calls himself the Midnight Man, before he strikes again. The psychology is less than impressive. At one point, the profiler employed by Hendrix’s team pegs the Midnight Man as coming from a Christian background, solely because he used the word legion when speaking to a survivor of one of his attacks. Staccato prose doesn’t help (“The work was important. It kept people alive. It put killers in prison”). This is an uninspired effort that’s best for readers who have never read a similar book before. Agent: Shane Salerno, Story Factory.

January 15, 2020
Los Angeles may not have snow at Christmastime, but it's got the next best thing: a stone-cold serial killer who provides FBI behavioral analyst Caitlin Hendrix (Into the Black Nowhere, 2018, etc.) with her third, and perhaps most chilling, adversary. What kind of person breaks into houses when the whole family is home, executes both parents, but leaves the children alive to live with their nightmares? Only someone, as Caitlin tells her boss, CJ Emmerich, who has "deliberately created surviving witnesses." The Midnight Man, as he's soon dubbed, dispatches four married couples, leaving behind such memorabilia as scrawled messages proclaiming "I am the legion of the night" and images of eyes drawn in blood on a baby's forehead in suburban homes scattered around Los Angeles County before Caitlin, already reeling from the hospital bombing that nearly killed her best friend, ER nurse Michele Ferreira, catches her first real lead. Hannah Guillory, a plucky sixth grader, finds the Midnight Man attempting to break into her house, rouses her parents to call 911 before he gets inside, and then gives the task force assembled to catch him a description of the UNSUB--unknown subject--and his car that's just detailed enough to suggest something truly shocking, and readily identifiable, about him. Sheriff's Department investigator Gil Alvarez finds the theory Caitlin's based on Hannah's evidence too far-out to believe, but Caitlin herself is a true believer. Determined that she won't be outmaneuvered by a killer who's dramatically stepped up the pace of his murderous attacks, breached his self-imposed limits, and now threatens her star witness with abduction and worse, she hunkers down to catch a quarry whom she says is "like nothing I've ever dealt with"--as if she doesn't know that descriptions like that just set the bar even higher for the inevitable sequel. Gardiner has mastered the art of the serial-killer saga without an ounce of fat.

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January 1, 2020
In the third Caitlin Hendrix thriller, following the terrific UNSUB (2017) and Into the Black Nowhere (2018), a killer targets families. The Midnight Man (a sobriquet he gives himself) murders the parents but spares the children. Why? How does he select his victims? Hendrix, still learning the ropes as a rookie member of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, continues to battle demons from her past, left over from tragedies that both haunt her and give her the strength and determination to be a killer-hunter. As the Midnight Man proves to be her most elusive prey yet, Caitlin becomes ever more determined to catch him, no matter the cost to herself. Readers of the first two Hendrix novels won't be surprised to hear that the story in this suspenseful thriller is exquisitely constructed. No by-the-numbers thriller here; this one definitely lives up to its predecessors.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Gardiner is on a roll with this series, gathering fans with each installment like a snowball gathering mass as it rumbles down a hill.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)