Here’s the set up. A doctor involved in black market organ smuggling is waiting for his pick up, but as the pick up arrives the police close in and the doctor speeds off. He goes to his partner’s house and tells him that he got the money, but didn’t make the drop because of the police. The partner, knowing that the smugglers they were working for are incredibly dangerous, kills the doctor, takes the money, and hopes that the smugglers won’t connect him with the now dead doctor.

There is a conflict in a hospital. A nurse rushes out of surgery followed closely by a surgeon who yells at her and threatens her until the surgeon’s wife (also a doctor at the same hospital,) and a third doctor, step in. The surgeon has made a mistake in surgery, the wife thinks he’s high, and the other doctor is a big guy who happened to be close.

The nurse wakes up strapped to an examining table in the dark. A doctor begins to torture her, giving her something to make her more sensitive to the pain.

A detective receives a tip that a certain doctor has 2 kilos of cocaine that he recently purchased from the smuggler in his cabin. The detective has a score to settle with the smuggler and breaks into the cabin without a search warrant. In a refrigerator in the basement he finds two severed heads.

Confused? It doesn’t get any better. The first part of the book was slow, confusing and difficult to get through. The serial killer is a surgeon who wants to be Mengele. In the first part of the book we are treated to a description on a video tape he shot while torturing the nurse mentioned above. I read Stephen King without batting an eyelash. I’ve read The Story of O. This made me squeamish and gave me nightmares. In the second part, the prose improved, but the serial killer left a journal of his "experiments in pain" and it is more graphic and sadistic.

Our "hero," Amanda Jaffe is a sweet, naïve criminal attorney. She commits the same stupid mistake twice. She goes to a crime scene alone, armed only with a gun she isn’t sure she could use if she had to. She admits that this is stupid after the first time, why does she do it again? If I were called in the middle of the night to go to a house in the middle of nowhere after 12 people had been brutally murdered in it I wouldn’t go alone the first time, no matter how groggy I was after the call.

The rest of the cast are equally flat and stupid. I’m pretty sure the smuggler and his henchmen were purchased from Acme. There isn’t an ounce of originality to them. The police were purchased at the same time (maybe there was a sale.) The husband and wife doctors hate one another and finger each other. They’re basically rotten, petty characters, at no point do they become people.

The murderer, in my opinion, stuck out like a sore thumb, just because he had no reason to be in the story. He wasn’t involved enough to be a red herring. However, there was another character who wasn’t involved enough to be a red herring and he must have been intended to be one.

If you just want to read about sadism read The Story of O, it at least has a story. If you want to read a mystery novel with sadism go for Kiss the Girls (haven’t read it myself, but it freaked out a friend of mine.) And if you just want something scary try Gerald’s Game by Stephen King. But what ever you do, don’t read this book.




Recommended: Yes