Krishna
Dean is isolated in a cabin in the woods in the midst of winter and he is a recovering alcoholic. His brother Jared was to join him, driving down from Knoxville. He thinks about the anonymous death threats he had received.
He spooks himself several times but when he gets firewood for the fire and returns, before he can close the door. He sees a masked stranger strike him dead and utter the words ‘Dead by Midnight’.
The above is all in the prologue.
Now, Lorie Hammonds is getting death threats. She is also young, and ruing that she has no chance at romance when her best friend Cathy just got married and was off for her honeymoon.
Mike Birkette, a handsome young man, and Lorie were in love but she moved away in search of a (successful) Hollywood stardom before returning some years later.
Meanwhile Mike Birkette is looking after his children the nine and eleven year olds. He thinks of Lorie with attraction but knows that he will marry the staid and uninspiring Abby.
Maleah Purdue had her brother marrying and her boss renewing her troubled marriage with a second honeymoon with her husband. The brother is indeed marrying Cathy, the best friend of Lorie.
Now, when Lorie gets the second death threat, she does not want to go to Mike but goes to Maleah instead, who works in the detective business, for help.
Meanwhile Derek Lawrence who worked as an FBI profiler before starting his own agency, attends the birthday of the mother he hates. It was arranged by his sister Diana. She arranged this huge gathering she called ‘just for a few close friends and family’. There he meets Alex, a smart blond who has an empty airhead bimbo- like mannerism.
Tagg Chambless, the football player, was the one whose wife was murdered and Derek was supposed to be ‘in’ on the investigation since he used to work for FBI. The girl who was murdered was an adult film actress and a playboy model before she grabbed Tagg for a husband.
A bit confusing with all the characters, then. And the author adds to it.
Sanders, a detective, is entertaining a client, Tagg Chambless, who is a famous athlete and rich. In fact Tagg only wants to talk to the owner, Griffin Powell but Griffin and his wife were away on vacation and he had to settle to talk to the Number Two, Sanders. Sanders, after his wife’s death has been a lover of his secretary Barbara Jean. She is present as his assistant as well for the interview. Tagg wants Sanders’s agency to investigate the murder of his wife Hillary. She was a porn star when she met Tagg and her producer and then lover tried to dissuade her from leaving the industry. It all ties in, kind of. Sanders is Maleah’s boss.
Wait, and then there’s Charles Wong. Charles Wong is a man without a job and no skills and he lives with his wife Lily and two children, Jenny and Jessy. Charlie has been receiving death threats too. First one, which he thought was a prank, and then another.
When two murders have the same Modus Operandi – the body was naked but with a mask and possibly receiving two death threats, Powell agency is puzzled.
Derek and Holt Reinan from the police are working together on this and comparing notes. (And thus find the similar execution style).
The story is weak, the dialogs are insipid. Yes, I get that there is a killer threatening a whole bunch of people and Lorie and company electrifyingly discover that all those victims were working on the same movie.
But help me understand; Lori ditched Mike for her dream of making it in California in show biz. OK, I’ll buy that. Not having succeeded, she acted in a porn movie – with people who are being threatened. Now she is back and Mike is oh-so-much-in-love. All friends are ‘Don’t worry; people do make mistakes. It should not make a difference’. Really? I am not being a puritanical man here nor is this a moral outrage but how is it that such an “innocent mistake” does not matter to anyone? Not to friends – luckily there seem to be no relatives – and uniformly they shrug it off as a ‘purely innocent mistake’. Does not seem realistic at all. And so her outrage that Mike seems to hate her seems surprising to a reader like me.
Not suggesting that she should be pilloried now but that attitudes seem to be extreme. Also when you have sexual tensions between practically everyone – Graham and Maleah, Lorie and Mike and maybe I am forgetting another couple there? – it seems to be a lack of imagination to go over the same groove.
When Charles Wong, an actor in the same porn picture is visited by a man who seems to have reliable information to “prove” that he is Charle’s wife’s cousin – which the killer overheard at the restaurant she was waitressing – he lets the person in but is murdered in the explicit fashion; multiple gunshot wounds, body found naked and with a mask.
A killer who makes sure that both his M.O and the list of victims are known to law enforcement in advance, then. (Would that make the task of defending the remaining folks easier, you wonder.)
The story keeps moving where instead of (sorry, in addition to, focusing on the murderer) Lorie and Mike have their sexual tensions in conversations and Graham and Maleah are working together with sexual tensions, the story takes on a ‘oh my God, get on with the main tale’ vibe and you wonder whether it is time to stop reading now.
If you read on, more pain is in store for you. Another co star calls Lorie since she also got death threats and in the midst of what must be an anxious conversation (in real life at least) she wants to know if Lorie is back with her boyfriend.
Then Lorie goes and does something totally madcap and says ‘it sounded right’. Then when Lorie’s past is exposed on the TV, Mike agonizes that free speech is cruel because it punishes both the guilty and innocent. In Lorie’s case ‘the guilty who had paid for her guilt’. Yeah? When was the score fully settled? Who determines when it is ‘fully paid and she is beyond the pall of accusation’? I am not arguing for pillorying a person for a fault – however egregious – for the rest of the life but it seems odd that one person says ‘Fine, it is done, let nobody talk about it anymore’. Nor am I unsympathetic to Lorie’s plight after she did what she did. The aurhor’s fixation on sex and ‘oh let bygones be bydones’ without even a proper explanation seems to be more irritating than inducing sympathy for the character.
In spite of high security, the man (in disguise) manages to kill a bodyguard and kill Ebony now known as Shonee. But then she invited it herself. Instead of staying in her fortress like apartment like her husband Toni (yes, that Toni) asked her to, she insists on going with him to the night club.
And that too, near midnight! (‘I am not going to let a madman stop me from enjoying my life’. Yes, well done!)
Go figure. Am I the only one who sees the crazy lack of logic in the plot?
Her bodyguard is dragged and killed but even though the door is open, the killer did not pursue Lorie. So they conclude (with their superior intelligence) that this act is not part of the Midnight Killer’s repertoire.
This latest incident seems to be part of another series where someone is targeting the employees of Powell Agency directly. Threatened, with resources more than FBI (as admitted in the story) and not hesitant to use any method to get result, what does Griff, who owns Powell do? Hire two psychics so that they can ‘sense’ things. And use that to build a profile of the killer so that they can catch him quicker than traditional investigations. Not convinced? Skeptical? Don’t worry. So was Maleah. She was a ‘partial skeptic’ but ‘willing to accept that some people had greater sensing powers than others’. If you thought I’m being sarcastic and that the above are statements with tongue firmly in cheek, you are absolutely right. What complete rot for a plot!
She brings in another person who is secretly in love with Lorie and vows to protect her from the Midnight Killer. This is because – my opinion – the midnight killer gets caught a bit too early and a bit too dramatically and when Lorie thinks she can finally relax, wham!, she falls into his clutches. Even that person never figures much in the story and seems to be an introduction to give you one more jolt. Talk about poor plotting!
Apparently, even though this is the first book in the trilogy, the characters do appear in an earlier book by this author called The Silent Killer. The author’s note proudly proclaims to her fan base (I am definitely not one of them) that she tied up several loose ends of that story in this book but has left some here for you to follow in her later books – two after this to be precise. (For instance, who is now killing Powell agency employees?) That is another of my bugbear, leaving litle ‘read-baits’ so that you will buy more books to see what happens.
All in all, a very poor effort and not worth rushing over to buy this author’s other books.
3/10
— Krishna