Meg Gardiner, “UNSUB”

Killer set-up.

Even better execution.

Of course I have no idea how the light bulb went off for Meg Gardiner, but when it did there must have been a powerful feeling—oh, I gotta write that.

Who could resist?

And it’s one thing to have the concept. It’s a whole other deal to put so much savory sauce on the tofu. Concepts are one thing, but the storytelling is what counts and it’s no wonder the series has kept rolling—Into The Black Nowhere, The Dark Corners of The Night and, coming out later this year, Shadowheart.

After a teasing prologue and heart-stopping chapter one in UNSUB, where we learn narcotics detective Caitlin Hendrix has a calm sensibility in the middle of major danger, we head to the empty fields of the Bay Area including one with a “frenzied bubble of red and blue.” A police helicopter overhead, too. There’s a clearing in the “rustling cornstalks” and a strangled woman. There’s a bullwhip around her neck. And a distinctive symbol pounded into her chest.

And it all comes rushing back to Caitlin Hendrix. The Prophet. He’s back. After twenty years.  After eleven unsolved murders. It’s not that Caitlin was a detective the first time around—not at all. She was a kid back then. There’s cold and then there’s cold. The Prophet is an UNSUB, an unknown subject. And he was wicked. “The way he’d take two victims at a time and pose them in grotesque scenes, like mannequins in display windows from hell. The way he’d etch his signature into their flesh: the ancient sign for Mercury, messenger of the gods, guides to the underworld.”

Could the new victim be the work of a copycat killer? Or could it be the real deal? Him?

Okay, you’re thinking you’ve read a serial killer thriller or two, what’s the big deal here? You’ve read novels about serial killers coming out of hibernation and surfacing years later and, so what?

Immediately Caitlin and Senior Homicide Sergeant Joe Guthrie head to a boardinghouse
“painted a sickly seafoam green … a gingerbread Victorian that would have worth a fortune in this gentrifying part of San Francisco, if not for the peeling paint and overflowing trash cans.”

The man inside is “weathered, slim, his hair shorn close, a prickly white.” Caitlin is there to ask the man to help her catch The Prophet.

And the man is Caitlin’s father—Mack Hendrix. And he was haunted—tormented, spooked, scarred—by his failure to catch The Prophet twenty years earlier. When Caitlin was nine years old, her father brought the case files home, spread them across the workbench in the garage, and asked her to organize them. Mack wants Caitlin to run away from the case that wrecked his life. Danger, Caitlin, run the other way.

Yeah, well, not likely.

So, can daughter succeed where father failed? Will father’s experiences and memories come in handy? Maybe? Or perhaps will Mack find a way to make matters worse, to muck things up? Will the case also break Caitlin? Will she end up like dad?

The hook is set and swallowed. We’re off. Gardiner doesn’t hold back. The Prophet is deeply diabolical. He is “liquid and changeable and poisonous.” And, of course, he’s not done. Gardiner plays fair as dogged Caitlin gets on the trail and starts tracking things down.

Gardiner, who won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original for China Lake, is an assured storyteller. Caitlin Hendrix is her third series character after Jo Beckett (four books) and Evan Delaney (five). She’s written four standalone mysteries, too, and knows a thing about clue-finding and building tension. Think dad will remain a grumpy loser on the sidelines? Think again. Think a plot that involves Dante’s Inferno won’t end up underground? Think again.

Crack open UNSUB and get ready to take a ride. To pose a central question from the novel: “When you open a wound, can you control the flow of blood?”

Well, can you?