It's set in a small California town where the police department is struggling to catch a serial rapist. The lead character, a fairly rookie policeman, is engaging and witty and the narrative is good on his fears about the safety of his wife an children with a very clever rapist loose where they live.
I had a few problems with it. It's far too long. I know that in real life serial rapists are very difficult to catch and it can take years. This book covered about ten months and at times I felt that was how long I'd been reading it. Police procedures are slow, thorough and repetitive, and that applied to huge swathes of this book too.
Upside, I didn't give up on it and I didn't skim read the last 100 pages either so it must have had something. Downside, the perp was caught in the end by making a stupid mistake of the type we had spent 350 pages learning he didn't make, and by changing his MO in a rather unrealistic way.
According to Amazon, Mr Waterman wrote anther book with the same two main detectives in it, this time chasing a serial child abductor and rapist. Seems to have a bit of a nasty theme developing there , and for that reason, plus the fact that I seriously doubt I would ever have time hanging so heavily on my hands that I couldn't find something better to read, I'll be giving it a miss.
Yeah, life’s too short!
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