Book review : The Killing Hour - Lisa Gardner

I love crime fiction but I do tend to find that a lot of novels end up resembling each other and frequently guess the outcome long before the end. Not so with Lisa Gardner. I've read a few of her books already, including Live To Tell and The Neighbour (click through for the reviews), and every time, she's had me on the edge of my seat, so I snapped up another of her books, The Killing Hour, when I spotted it in the £2 section at The Works.

The book follows feisty but fragile trainee FBI agent Kimberly Quincy, who stumbles across a dead body at the Quantico campus. As the body looks uncannily like her own dead sister, Kimberly, along with Special Agent Mac McCormack from Georgia, dodges the Feds, ignores the fact that neither of them have any jurisdiction and sets off to track down the killer.

Mac has spent several years trying to outsmart a ruthless serial killer called the Eco Killer and he's convinced that this latest body is one of his victims. The Eco Killer's calling card is that he kidnaps young women in pairs, kills one and uses her body as a macabre treasure hunt clue, furnished with objects that can be pieced together to find the location of the second victim, abandoned in extreme temperatures and harsh terrain, goading the police to find her before it's too late.

It's an original plotline and the writing is chilling and full of suspense. Kimberly is a complex and endearing character - her budding romance with Mac and tentative bridge building with her father lead me to believe that she will have been picked up in subsequent novels, which I will have to investigate because I really like her as a character with great potential.

If you want a book that will have your nerves jangling and your heart thudding, look no further !

star rating : 5/5

RRP : £7.99

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Orion (4 Mar. 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1409117421
• ISBN-13: 978-1409117421
• Product Dimensions: 12.8 x 2.8 x 19.7 cm