Red Angel (Criminally Insane #2) (2003)

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by Douglas Clegg AKA Andrew Harper



Someone is murdering children and leaving the bodies to be found.

 


Still recovering from the traumatic events of the previous book, psychiatric technician Trey Campbell returns to his job working with the criminally insane at Darden State Hospital in a new unit for the particularly dangerous, just as the young son of the unit’s director goes among the missing.

 


Knowledge of the killer’s pattern makes Trey and director Elise Conroy aware that they only have hours to rescue young Lucas, which makes it more palatable when they take some big risks that would have been more difficult to accept otherwise--risks involving an inmate at Darden who seems to know more about the killer than he possibly could... Meanwhile, a dedicated detective trying to prove herself to her colleagues also closes in on the killer, leading to a suspenseful climax. This book is a big improvement over the previous one. Douglas Clegg still has an odd penchant for extremely short sentences, paragraphs, and chapters.

 

Douglas Clegg


However, the plotting is tight and there is not nearly as much extraneous detail as the first book in the series. The modus operandi of the killer is gruesome and genuinely clever.


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