The Ripper Gene

In rural Crossroads, Miss., in 1983, young Lucas Madden is about to go trick-or-treating on Halloween with his 12-year-old girlfriend, but his mother, a nurse who’s chaperoning the kids with another mother, insists that they stop the car after spotting two teenage boys who appear to be seriously injured at the side of the road. Lucas’s mother gets out of the car and disappears. Unfortunately, after this genuinely creepy and moving prologue, Ransom’s debut becomes a routine serial-killer thriller. More than 20 years later, Lucas is working as the FBI’s criminal profile coordinator for the New Orleans field office when he lands the investigation of the Snow White Killer, who leaves his female victims marked with bloody letters on their foreheads and an apple concealing a razor nearby. The novel’s interesting but not particularly original premise—that a deficit in a certain gene identified by Lucas is present in more than 70% of all serial killers—remains underdeveloped. Agent: Susan Gleason, Susan Gleason Literary Agent. (Aug.)