An enjoyable book with plenty of suspense and a surprise villain. A renowned psychiatrist who made herself deeply unpopular with the local police force when she allowed a serial killer to go to a mental hospital instead of getting the death penalty due to her evaluation of her mental state, she needs to work with the police who hate her when a killer begins targeting her patients, family and friends for no apparent motive.
It's well written with plenty of suspense and an original, good plot. The characters are well-drawn and basically believable but a few things like an otherwise excellent book down. For a start, it's at least 100 pages too long and starts to drag in the middle, with the bodies piling up but no real progress in the investigation or clue as to how or why it might be happening, so it gets a bit repetitive with one body after another, getting less and less linked to the central character. It's also told a little bit too much from the characters point of view - I'd have liked to have seen a bit more input from some of the other fascinating characters and more of the impact these bizarre events were making on the community at large.
I was beginning to get a little bored with this when one of the police characters actually says after the umpteenth victim "this is beginning to get boring" - which really made me laugh because that's exactly what I was thinking and here was the author expressing it via one of her own characters! I wonder if she realised the story needed to move along at this point and put it in as a joke, or if she unwittingly made a joke at her own books expense!
Secondly, as mentioned by a previous reviewer, the endless sex scenes really are boring. I've never been bothered by sex scenes in books but they aren't well-written, a little embarrassing really, and they are very frequent and repetitive and add nothing to the story for the pages they take up.
Finally, as the bodies pile ever higher for ever less logical reasons, it begins to feel like the book is relying a little too much on coincidences. Without spoiling the plot, one character has an unexplained illness which turns out to be down to foul play, yet the book earlier states she'd been tested for every possible cause on the planet before they decided it was psychosomatic - I find that stretching credibility too far, as I do that a character was killed and the autopsy also failed to find that it was down to foul play. Sometimes it just feels like things are explained away too easily for ease of plot. Rose will have to watch this if she doesn't want to go down the road of James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell and start churning out formulaic books written without any love or passion just to meet a contract. She's nowhere near that yet, but she'll have to watch the rot isn't setting in here.
Still a worthy read though - I found simply skipping over all the sex scenes saved me about 40 pages and made it worth reading to the end!