Eye of the Beholder-Eye of the Beholder

Eye of the Beholder
David Ellis
Putnam, July 2007, $24.95, 400 pp.
ISBN 0399154337

In the summer of 1989, six women were found in the basement near the maintenance lockers of Mansbury College. All the women were tortured and each died in a different manner ranging from strangulation to near decapitation. One of the victims, college student Ellie Danzinger had gotten a restraining order out against Terry Burgos, a part time handyman at the college. Whey they went to his home, they found enough evidence to convict him for five of the killings. The case of the sixth girl he killed Cassie Bentley, daughter to a mega-mogul billionaire was never tried to her father’s influence. In 1996, Terry is killed but his last words, cryptic though they might be, were to the prosecutor Paul Riley: “I am not the only one”.

In the present, a series of murders are linked to the killings in 1989. Paul Riley, now the head of mega powerful law firm, receives strange notes from the killer, has his finger prints on one of the victims and is forced into part of the new case with it evidence similar to the case that solidified his reputation. Looked upon from a fresh perspective with new information, Riley finds that the 1989 case didn’t reveal all its secrets and someone wants them to stay buried.

This is one of the most energizing and emotionally satisfying police procedurals of the year. David Ellis makes his characters come alive so that readers will either root for or detest them; no one will remain detached. There is plenty of action and the changing from the eighties to the nineties to the present is smooth so that the readers are never jarred out of the storyline. The protagonist as he ages from a man who sees life as black and white to a person who realize there are subtle greys has to make some decisions as he confronts his greatest success with the realization it is also his greatest failure.

Harriet Klausner