Fear Itself: A Novel

E.L. Pender, the FBI agent introduced in Nasaw's previous mystery (The Girls He Adored, is a few days short of retirement when he gets a letter from a California woman with an unlikely premise--that the deaths of three people who, like her, attended a conference for people suffering from a variety of phobias (some very strange indeed) were not the random accidents they appeared to be, but the work of a serial killer. Once Pender meets Dorie Bell, the letter writer, he believes her, and with the help of a gutsy agent sidelined from an active career in the FBI by her recently diagnosed MS, he tracks the murderer--the man who bankrolled the conference in order to meet his victims, learn their vulnerabilities, and use their fears to kill them. The sociopathic villain of this suspenseful novel is a sort of junior-grade Hannibal Lecter who gets his bloody comeuppance in the end; having written him out of the picture, and set Pender up for retirement, one wonders who the resourceful author will turn to for his next thriller. --Jane Adams