Shadowheart

In the fourth UNSUB novel (after UNSUB, 2017; Into the Black Nowhere, 2018; and The Dark Corners of the Night, 2020), FBI Special Agent Caitlin Hendrix is confronted with an investigator's nightmare: not one, but two serial killers. One of them, Efrem Judah Goode, is currently behind bars, and after years of incarceration, he's suddenly speaking out about the murders he's committed. The other is still out there, murdering people in apparent homage to Goode's crimes. To find one killer, Caitlin must enter the mind of the other. What makes the UNSUB novels work so well is the way Gardiner, who recently cowrote the terrific Heat 2 (2022) with filmmaker Michael Mann, has designed her protagonist. Caitlin, a police detective at the beginning of UNSUB, is now a relatively green FBI investigator whose tragic past has left her hesitant and vulnerable, but also determined to confront the darkest parts of herself as well as the people she's tasked with apprehending. As always, the writing is exquisite and the story is perfectly crafted.

The fourth of Gardiner's UNSUB series opens a door into what seems like an endless series of homicides. Arrested by Jessup County Deputy Marius Hayes in a Tennessee motel parking lot, drifter Efrem Judah Goode insists he had nothing to do with the deaths of the three women inside the motel or the fourth, also mummy-wrapped with duct tape, in the back seat of the car he'd been driving. But he's perfectly willing to cop to 13 other homicides stretching back to 2003. He's unsurprisingly convicted of the four brand-new murders as well, but Special Agent Caitlin Hendrix of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, isn't satisfied. Working with other members of the unit willing to put in endless hours in pursuit of scant evidence, she realizes that this new streak of murders, which continues apace while Goode is safely imprisoned, is the work of a copycat. Acting on further information from Finch Winter, an adopted teen who's convinced that her birth mother was one of Goode's victims, she uncovers enough links between Goode and the copycat to reach a truly alarming conclusion: Yesteryear's killer knows perfectly well about his latter-day imitator and is doing his best to provide information and directives about potential victims from his prison cell. As the bodies dot roadsides from the Southeast to New York, Caitlin, who also gets potentially distracting hints that the elusive killer she's called the Ghost is still active, struggles to come up with a reason why at least two different killers would target so many victims from so many places for such a long time. Readers will likely be divided on whether the final surprises are worth the slog. Enough murders, past and present, to sate all but the most voracious serial-killer buffs. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.