MANHATTAN PLAGUED BY TERROR: RED RIBBON KILLER RAMPAGES!
The third outing in the gripping Mancuso-O’Brian murder mystery series, this case is particularly fascinating, Watson—because it’s about to get personal! when meticulous NYPD cop-turned-private eye Joey Mancuso is called in to help the Midtown South precinct solve a series of brutal murders targeting young professional women.Notorious serial killer Ted Bundy once said: “Murder is not about lust, and it’s not about violence. It’s about possession”—a notion that haunts the NYPD when three isolated strangulation cases leave the midtown unit stumped. Case #1 at first seems to be an eve of kinky sex gone wrong. But when second and third bodies turn up—this time with the sign of the cross carved into their breasts—New York’s finest think they have a serial killer on their hands. There couldn’t be a better time to call in wry private investigator Joey Mancuso and his brother, Father Dominic O’Brian.
Joey finds himself grasping at straws—and concocting a psychological profile of his killer, thanks to some tips from his FBI agent sometime-girlfriend. Why the gruesome carving of the crucifix? And why are all the murders so close to NYPD’s Midtown South Precinct? The more Joey digs, the more he realizes his victims aren’t simply the victims of patterned sex crimes, but of a narcissistic psychopath gunning for someone—someone with ties to the precinct, perhaps.
With a little help from his former partner the daring and elegant Detective Lucy (Lucifer) Roberts, as well as always-wise and gentle guidance from Father O’Brian, Joey and his ragtag team of investigators race the clock from their new digs behind Captain O’Brian’s Irish Pub to catch their killer before he strikes again—because it’s only a matter of time before he hits too close to home.
Author Owen Parr has modeled his heroes after Holmes and Watson, and all the Doylesque markings of a head-scratching, heart-racing puzzler lie in these pages. But not only fans of Holmes, but also of the gritty police procedurals by Raymond Chandler, Joseph Wambaugh, Lawrence Block, and Rex Stout will gobble up the series. As will fans of no-nonsense legal procedural protagonists like Dennis Carstens’ Marc Kadella and Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason.