Good Morning, Killer

FBI Special Agent Ana Gray returns in this complex, involving thriller about a dedicated officer's search for a serial rapist that proceeds alongside her passionate and obsessive love affair with a fellow cop, Santa Monica detective Andrew Berringer. Before their relationship culminates in a violent episode that leaves him clinging for life and her accused of attempted murder, the deviant who brutalized the teenage girl Ana has taken into her heart and under her wing has found another victim, and Ana's efforts to stop him before he kills her drive Smith's stunning narrative to a shocking denouement. But the author has additional surprises in store for the reader that involve Andrew's motivations for escalating their passion--to keep Ana from reopening a closed case involving bank robbery, fraud, and deception, which will lead her to reevaluate the man, and the obsession, that has brought her to the brink of personal and professional oblivion. While many authors who feature the same protagonist in all their mysteries simply serve up the same character in different scenarios in each new outing, April Smith expertly illuminates aspects of her heroine's psychological life and devotion to justice that deepen our understanding about who she is--a complicated, brave, multidimensional woman it is a pleasure to meet in this engrossing and powerful novel. --Jane Adams.