Flashback

May 15, 2024
It looks as if the Bayside Strangler is back in business--and his nefarious designs are by no means limited to strangling. Fifteen years ago, San Diego PD Detectives Todd Williams and Paula Chase's search for Alyssa Morgan, a paraplegic single mother who'd gone missing, ended with the discovery of her hanging in Tecolote National Park. As it turned out, Alyssa would be the second of five young women the Bayside Strangler had killed before mysteriously stopping his work. Now Chloe and Sloane Morgan, the two daughters who'd dedicated their lives to finding out who made them orphans, have vanished as well. There's no way that Kendra Michaels, a music therapist who was once blind and is now hypersensitive, will walk away from an appeal to join the hunt for them. The road to answers is strewn with both obstacles and distractions, from Kendra's continuing romantic pursuit by freelance negotiator Adam Lynch to the murder of Paula Chase, whose retirement doesn't keep her safe from an intruder looking for clues the Morgan sisters have dug up, to the return of the strangler, who seems determined to outdo his earlier tally in the present day. The authors reveal the killer's identity early on, link his criminal enterprise to the shadowy Dayton Group--which has attracted the attention of the former attorney general in Washington--and give him a personal vendetta against Kendra. None of this imparts the slightest heft or urgency to this generic serial-killer-with-highly-placed-government-connections saga. Such a shame that all those women died to so little effect. Pass the salt.

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