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Book Review of Monster (Alex Delaware, Bk 13)

Monster (Alex Delaware, Bk 13)
Chesara avatar reviewed on + 153 more book reviews


ow can a nonfunctional psychotic locked up in a supposedly secure institution for homicidal madmen predict brutal murders in the outside world? This is the enigma that Dr. Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis must penetrate in order to stop these horrific killings. First, a marginal actor is found dead in a car trunk, sawn in half. Months later, a psychologist at Starkweather Hospital for the Criminally Insane is discovered murdered and mutilated in a tantalizingly similar way. Dr. Claire Argent had been working caringly with Ardis Peake, a subnormal mental patient locked up for decades after annihilating his mother and the ranching family that rescued him from homelessness. When reports of Peake's incoherent rambling begin to make frightening sense as predictions of yet more murders, Alex and Milo are drawn into a web of family secrets, vengeance, and manipulation--both inside Starkweather and on the L.A. streets, where death, drugs, and sex are marketed as commodities. The climactic discovery they make as they race to save new victims gives fresh and terrifying meaning to the concept of true monstrosity.