cover image Shadow Walk

Shadow Walk

Jane Waterhouse. Putnam Publishing Group, $23.95 (310pp) ISBN 978-0-399-14305-2

True-crime writer Garner Quinn (Graven Images; Playing for Keeps) has a dilemma in this well-crafted thriller: she's lost her appetite for writing and sleuthing. After her last adventure, she just wants to stay home with her 14-year-old daughter on the New Jersey coast and be one of those ""women who'd never once skipped a teacher's conference to interview some psychopath on death row."" But when Gordon Spangler comes back into her life, the supremely confident Quinn finds herself indecisive--and it's a humbling experience. Twenty-five years earlier, Spangler, the father of one of Quinn's school friends, killed his entire family and then vanished without a trace. The crime has haunted her. When writer TJ Sterling, one of her less successful colleagues (whose work is ""one small step up from the tabloids""), tells her he has sighted Spangler, Quinn doesn't know what to believe. But when Sterling is found dead in his Charlottesville home three weeks later, apparently a suicide, she's drawn into the mystery. Without pause, Quinn is on the trail that will lead her to the murderer and deeper into her own past than she may care to go. Waterhouse sets Quinn apart from other tough, vulnerable female sleuths by giving her an interesting moral dilemma and by making her appealingly clear-sighted: she knows where the line is and why she is about to cross it. Most aspects of the complex resolution to this chilling tale will please readers who won't be able to turn the pages fast enough to get there. (Nov.)