Malice-Lisa Jackson

Malice
Lisa Jackson
Kensington, Apr 2009, $24.00
ISBN 9780758211842

Twelve years ago Rick Bentz divorced his cheating wife Jennifer. Soon after ending his marriage, Jennifer died in a car crash. He identified the corpse. Rick left LAPD taking a job with the New Orleans police and remarried Olivia.

While driving during a storm, Rick is involved in an accident that hospitalizes him. He suddenly smells Jennifer’s sweet perfume and sees her in his hospital room. After being discharged a package containing a death certificate and photos of a woman who looks like Jennifer arrives with a Culver City, California postmark. Deciding he needs to know the truth but conceals from his wife his fear that he is losing his mind, Rick heads to California wondering how she can be alive when he saw her body. At the same he arrives in the Los Angeles area, his last unsolved case at LAPD is reopened as the Twenty-one Killer apparently returns strangling identical twins on their 21st birthday. Bentz knows somehow he is the link, but not by whom or why.

The key to this action-packed suspense thriller is the viewpoint of the Bentz adversary as the audience sees a different perspective as to what happened a dozen years ago and the target of vengeance may be Bentz, but the avenue of achievement is through Olivia. The story line is action-packed from the first time Bentz’s olfactory sense kicks in and never slows down as the haunting of the sleuth is by someone overflowing with MALICE towards him and his loved ones tales its’ toll. (see LOST SOULS for his daughter's thriller).

Harriet Klausner