A Perfect Evil – Alex Kava

I had never heard of Alex Kava but recently I was talking about thrillers with a friend and she was kind enough to offer to lend me this one.

I really enjoyed it in the sense that it was a page turner, fast paced and with an interesting story. It has a female profiler as the main character and I just love to read about profilers and psychological analysis and that sort of thing. I think we ended up not having much in the way of explaining how profilers work but it was interesting nonetheless.

Maggie O’Dell is a FBI profiler called to a small town to help the sheriff’s department investigating the murder of a young boy. Nick Morrelli is the town sheriff, a confident ex athlete but with no real experience in fighting crime. And suddenly it seems that it’s not just that murder but a serial killer maybe on the loose as another boy is kidnapped.

One thing upset me a bit, part of the story is told from the killer’s point of view and there are much more descriptions of the evil things done to him than of the ones he did. It’s a lot easier when you know nothing of the bad guy except for his crimes but I think this made for a much interesting, if graphic and uncomfortable reading. Maybe the author’s goal was to make us have ambivalent feelings toward him. There was a strong suspense element almost till the end and the big surprise is not only who the killer is but also something that is a big spoiler so I can't post here … maybe thinking of a sequel…

There’s a bit of a romantic subplot but it never really develops into a relationship so I wouldn’t call it a romantic suspense. Maybe she is saving that for a sequel too.

All in all a really intense read and so I would give it a B+.