The good lie

This effective thriller from bestseller Torre (If You Dare) opens with teenager Scott Harden staggering home after apparently escaping from the Bloody Heart Killer, who has kidnaped, sexually tortured, and killed six other high school students, "all popular, wealthy, and well liked," over the last three years. When Scott identifies science teacher Randall Thompson as the BHK, the case seems closed. However, high-profile attorney Robert Kavin, father of one of the earlier victims, declares that he doesn't believe Thompson is guilty and volunteers to lead his defense. Robert hires Gwen Moore, a psychiatrist who specializes in potentially dangerous clients, to prepare a profile of the killer and match it to Thompson, but Gwen is distracted by the recent suicide of one of her most disturbed patients, John Abbott. Should she have seen it coming--and why is Robert so curious about Abbott? Meanwhile, Scott's mother realizes that the young man is lying. The erotic tension between Gwen and Robert adds heat to the tricky plot. This kinky tale is compulsively readable. Agent: Maura Kye-Casella, Don Congdon Assoc. (July)

A vertiginous tale of serial kidnapping and murder that begins with a miracle and then heads sharply downhill. There's a reason Gwen Moore is known as the Doc of Death. The patients in her psychiatric practice have angry, volatile, or violent histories; they're people who are afraid they're going to hurt somebody. On the morning she fails to respond to messages from pharmacist John Abbott, who's expressed mounting hostility toward his wife, Brooke, the couple are both found dead in their home, she stricken by a heart attack, he stabbed in the stomach. So Gwen, overwhelmed with guilt, is in no mood to celebrate the miraculous escape of Beverly High School senior Scott Harden, the seventh victim the Bloody Heart Killer has kidnapped and imprisoned and the only one to survive with his genitalia and his life. Even better, Scott quickly identifies his captor as BHS science teacher Randall Thompson. But as attorney Robert Kavin, whose son, Gabe, was the Bloody Heart Killer's sixth victim, tells Gwen shortly after he picks her up at a bar and follows her home to bed, he's so far from convinced that Thompson is the man who killed his son that he offers to defend him pro bono and asks Gwen to join his team as a consultant who can assemble a psychological profile that will prove that Thompson isn't the murderer--unless of course it proves that he is. If the tale isn't as tightly wound as Every Last Secret (2020), it's a good deal more ambitious and twisty, and even readers who see some of its surprises coming will be alarmed and shocked by others. Great bedtime reading for insomniacs and people willing to act like insomniacs just this once. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.