Kill Me Once

Is vengeance a dish that needs to be enjoyed cold?

Samantha Faye aus Freihung am 22.11.2020
Bewertungsnummer: 1405846
Bewertet: Buch (Taschenbuch)

Brief opinion: Cold, colder, coldest - my veins turned into ice rinks - eerily good and incredibly captivating! Classy! Nathan Stiedowe as if driven by great ambition. He wants to emulate Richard Ramirez, the BTK killer, Richard Speck, the Son of Sam and John Wayne Gacy's crimes, but with one crucial difference. He will not repeat the mistakes that were their undoing. He's precise and meticulous, downright scary. Special Agent Dana Whitestone, late 30s, single, no children, only living with Oreo the cat, works at the FBI branch in Cleveland, Ohio. She chases the Cleveland Slasher, who already has five little girls on his conscience. As if this hunt wasn't nightmarish enough, the most recent crime scene features a picture of a hand with a pentagram on the inside. At first they can't assign it, but when an elderly woman is murdered in Los Angeles in exactly the same way as Ramirez, the Nightstalker when he had committed his first murder, the case draws frightening circles. Little does Dana know that she will have to travel across the United States, always out to catch the killer. She soon suspects that there might be some kind of connection to the serial killer. But even in her darkest nightmares she cannot imagine what this is like and that she will soon feel the hot breath of the killer on her neck. So who is the hunter, who is the hunted? And what's the whole purpose behind it? Because the killer has a master plan .. Jon Osborne has created a really nasty serial killer thriller here. Both are traumatized. Dana and Nathan walking in darkness. Both had bad childhoods, albeit for different reasons. Little by little the author reveals the background of Dana's past and her nemesis Nathan. Is his name even Nathan? Good question! He writes in a breathless, direct style of composition that goes straight to the kidneys and makes your nerves shake properly. The timing is almost perfect and what he writes about various serial killers is very well researched. Very shrewd thriller readers will foresee a decisive twist, but that doesn't detract from the reading experience, because then you really want to know what happens next. Both Dana and her antagonist Nathan are basically broken people. Dana likes the alcohol a little too much, but under the circumstances this is not surprising. Nathan not only has a horrible childhood behind him, but also had to experience another unspeakable horror as a young adult, which shattered something in him and finally triggered him to live out the darkness in himself. The author in no way apologizes for Nathan's actions. He maintains the neutral narrator's perspective. Dana is the one who expressively utters her emotions. The tension arises from the hunt for the perpetrator, but also from the interior views of various eclipses - Danas, where there is hope for a twilight, and Nathans, who is apparently lost in the eternal night. The book is compelling and scary until the end!