First Published: 2014
SPOILERS!!!
DD finds herself alone in an apartment where a terrible crime has taken place. A woman, Christine Ryan, was found dead in her bedroom. The place is arranged in a romantic way: champagne, flutes, and a rose. Yet, none of these element has been touched. The terrible thing about this crime is that parts of this woman’s skin have been ripped. While DD is supervising the scene, she hears someone singing a lullaby, and when she walks towards the voice, something happens and DD falls backwards on the stairs and instinctively she shoots her gun.
The second narrator this time is Adeline, a therapist, who doesn’t feel pain. Her family history is terrible. Her father liked to use his knife against his older daughter, Shana, and it was his wife who protected Adeline. When the police discover the bodies of several people on the property, they went after him, but he pushed his wife to slit his wrists and kill him. The girls went into care, and the mother died years later. Adeline was taken in by a university professor as her insensitivity to pain made her an interesting case, and he became her father. Shana, though, didn’t escape the system, and she ended up in jail after killing a twelve-year-old, and later two officers in prison and an inmate. Adeline visits her sister every month, but the visits are never easy.
Adeline also has a secret. From time to time she meets strangers in airport bars, and then she seduces them. When they are sleeping, she uses some drug to keep them unaware of what is happening, and she uses a scalpel to cut a small part of their shoulder blades, but none of these men is any the wiser as they think it is simply a small injury.
Adeline is also the therapist that DD goes for the terrible pain she is feeling after her work accident. DD can hardly function as her limbs hurt terribly. Alex has to help her with the basic things such as getting dressed or washing her hair, and she can’t even take her three-year-old son in her arms. It has been six weeks since the accident, and then a new victim is found under the same circumstances. What baffles the police, Alex and DD is how someone can skin a person without leaving any traces of his presence.
DD and Alex return to the apartment where she had her accident with her team and physical therapist. She remembers little and there is an investigation in its course since she shot her gun three times. Thanks to Russ Ilg, the therapist, she and the others realise that DD didn’t fall, but she was pushed.
Like always, this novel has me hooked from the very first pages. I am curious to find out who the killer is and if it is connected with Adeline and Shana.
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