cover image The Winter Foundlings

The Winter Foundlings

Kate Rhodes. Minotaur, $26.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-250-01432-0

After a harrowing experience helping to catch a serial slayer in 2014’s A Killing of Angels, the last thing London forensic psychologist Alice Quentin wants is another high-profile police case—especially since she seems to have blown her chance to kindle a relationship with sexy Det. Don Burns. But when a fourth girl, 10-year-old Ella Williams, is abducted from North London in a string of crimes that may be following in the bloody footsteps of notorious child murderer Louis Kinsella, Alice can’t refuse Burns’s appeal for help—particularly since Kinsella happens to be imprisoned at Northwood, the forbidding psychiatric prison where she has just started a research sabbatical. She has no inkling of the nightmare that awaits. With the clock ticking before Ella becomes the next corpse, the surprisingly vulnerable Alice finds herself forced to match wits with this psychotic master manipulator. Rhodes spins an atmospheric and suspenseful tale—until an implausible climax that many readers will see coming. Agent: Teresa Chris, Teresa Chris Literary Agency (U.K.). (Feb.)