Before He Kills by Blake Pierce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Crime Thriller, Police Procedural
“Detective Mackenzie White braced herself for the worst as she walked through the cornfield that afternoon.”
“It took no more than five seconds of seeing the blonde woman tied to the wooden pole before Mackenzie knew there was something much deeper going on here. Something unlike anything she had ever encountered. This was not what happened in the cornfields of Nebraska.”
“This is just the beginning, she thought.”
Women are being murdered across Omaha in a horrible way, tied to wooden polls and beaten to death with a barbed whip. Detective Mackenzie White is assigned as lead detective. Being a young, female officer she is trying to prove herself to her fellow officers while fighting her own personal battles as well.
“there was no dead body that would ever affect her as much as the first she had ever seen. She was almost reaching the point where she no longer saw her father’s body when she stepped onto a murder scene. But not yet. She’d been seven years old when she walked into the bedroom and saw him half-sprawled on the bed, in a pool of blood. And she had never stopped seeing it since.”
A serial killer is on the hunt for women who sell their bodies.
“As a boy, one of his favorite pastimes was to sit out on the back porch and watch their cat stalk around the yard. It was particularly interesting whenever it came upon a bird or, on one occasion, a squirrel. He’d watched that cat spend up to fifteen minutes stalking a bird, toying with it until it finally pounced on it, tearing out its neck and sending its little feathers into the air. He thought of that cat now, as he watched the woman arrive home from yet another night at work—a place of employment where she stood up on a stage and pandered her flesh. Like that cat from his childhood, he had been stalking her.”
Queue sexy FBI agent to assist with the investigation. Once it becomes a serial killer case, the FBI is called in help and Special Agent Ellington is just the partner Mackenzie needed.
“Already, she could tell that Ellington was easy to talk to and valued the opinions of others. And, quite frankly, it didn’t hurt that he was nice to look at.”
“So,” he said, “they really look down on you because you’re young and a woman?” She shrugged. “Seems that way. I’ve seen rookies come in—men, mind you—that get some ribbing, but they aren’t spoken down to the way they speak down to me. I’m young, motivated, and, according to a few, not too bad to look at. Something about that combination throws them off. It’s easier for them to write me off as the over-ambitious piece of ass than a woman under thirty years of age that has a harder work ethic than them.”
Special Agent Ellington gives Mackenzie the confidence she needs in herself, to trust her gut. Will her instincts catch a killer or put her in hot water?
Quick, easy to read Thriller that kept me engaged and reading deep into the night. The main character Detective Mackenzie White is likable and relatable. Written in the POV of Mackenzie and the killer. It is a short read and I felt that the killer could have been developed a little more. More details into his background and the why behind his actions. However these lacking details did not take away from the story. I am intrigued to learn more about Mackenzie and to see how she develops throughout the series.
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