A Review of "The Stranger You Seek" [72]

The Stranger You Seek:A Novel by Amanda Kyle Williams
Bantam, ISBN 978-0553808070
August 30, 2011, 304 pages

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Keye Street, the heroine of this book, will grab you from the very first page.

Sure, she is a kick-ass, take no hostages bail recovery agent, seeking out and bringing in those often very nasty and very desperate accused who want very much not to be found. But there is a lot more to her. She is Chinese-American, adopted by a very white bread couple (along with her gay African-American brother) after her Chinese grandparents were killed and she is an Atlanta native, born and bred, right down to the RC cola and MoonPies. She is also a damaged hero, the best kind, who lost her job as an FBI profiler and her marriage due to her alcoholism. Now four years later, she is sober..and at times hanging on by the skin of her teeth to her sobriety...she is making her living with this bail recovery job and private detective work, but she has not lost her profiling skills. When a serial killer appears in the oppressive summer heat of Atlanta and the fear is mounting, including some taunting letters to the police department, her old friend Lieutenant Aaron Rauser is not above asking for her help.

The papers have called me a monster. You’ve either concluded that I am a braggart as well as a sadist or that I have a deep and driving need to be caught and punished. And you must certainly be wondering if I am, in fact, the stranger you seek. Shall I convince you?

The killer, nicknamed the Wishbone Killer is going to be very hard to track down. He is killing men and women, people of all different races and economic backgrounds. But Keye is up to the challenge, especially when she is personally drawn into the killings, especially assisted as she is by an interesting group of friends that I hope we will see more of and learn more about in the next two promised book in this series, due out in 2012 and 2013.
And I found it amusing that the subject of blogging plays an important role in the story..who knew.

I thought the plot was very good and very believable as thrillers go. But the key to this book is...if you will forgive me...Keye. She is brave and fearless..sometimes so fearless as to be self destructive, and you know we love that in a good hero. She is flawed and believable, yet she is also smart..well, at least about most things. And she is often very funny, something I love in a psychological thriller. Even I can only take so much death and mayhem without a few lighter moments. I can not say I totally bought into a romance that developed..it seemed a bit off, but we will see how that goes in the next book. Because I can assure you I will be reading it. In several ways this book reminds me of the books of Karin Slaughter, and in my mind that is a great compliment.

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My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing a copy of this book for review.