Jonathan Nasaw

Picked up during a routine traffic stop in Monterey, California, a clever killer with multiple personalities--who may be responsible for a series of bizarre disappearances across the country--makes a daring escape from custody with Irene Cogan, his court-appointed psychiatrist, as his captive. Reprint.

The Girls He Adored

Roman

Angstspiel

Twenty-Seven Bones

Fear Itself

Charmingly disheveled FBI Special Agent E.L. Pender returns in this thriller by the acclaimed author of "The Girls He Adored." On his last day on the job, Pender encounters a barbarous villain who literally scares his victims to death.

A Novel

Jochen Stremmel

Thriller

Der Sohn des Teufels

The most terrifying novel you will read this year... Two hot young lovers who also happen to be cold-blooded killers . . . Lily deVries suffers from DVD, a psychiatric condition known as dissociative identity disorder. Triggered by a devastating childhood trauma, her mind has fragmented into different personalities known as 'alters'. There's the gentle, child-like Lily; the sexually insatiable Lilah; and Lilith - the violent psychopath. Now Lily has found herself in the Reed-Chase mental institution where they're hoping to find a cure. But there's another patient undergoing treatment at the Institute. Fellow DID sufferer Ulysses Maxwell faces life imprisonment following the rape and murder of a dozen women. When Lilith and Max - Maxwell's psychopathic alter - meet, the reaction is dynamite. And when the ingenious lovers engineer a bloody escape, it's only ex-FBI Agent Pender who has any chance of stopping the ensuing carnage. Teaming up with Dr Irene Cogan, a brilliant psychiatrist, he must take on a pair of killers who win hearts as easily as they slit throats.

When She Was Bad

'As Lewis's eyes adjusted to the light, what appeared at first to be a can of ivory-coloured sticks and stones proved to be a can of disarticulated bones, some like sticks, long and thin, flared out delicately at the ends, others roundish, like irregularly-shaped stones, and still others short, with conical tips. They were of course, the bones of a human hand. If he'd counted, he'd have found twenty-seven of them - eight carpals, five metacarpals, and fourteen phalanges.' Although officially retired, ex-Special Agent Pender can't ignore a plea for help from an old friend - especially when there's an all expenses paid trip to the Caribbean attached. Julian Coffee, St Luke's chief of police, needs Pender's help in tracking down a serial killer known as the 'Machete Man' because of his habit of cutting off the right hand of his victims. Pender is about to encounter the strangest and most baffling case of his long career.

27 Bones

The brilliant author of Fear Itself pulls readers into an intricate web of ritual killings orchestrated by an evil pair of murderers who always manage to be one step ahead of the law. Former FBI Special Agent E.L. Pender may be retired, but he jumps at the chance to help solve a particularly gruesome series of crimes in the U.S. Virgin Islands. This is no ordinary case, seeing as the right hand on each body in the string of murders is missing. The police want to keep the existence of a serial killer under wraps; they hope to solve the crime before a stampede sets in. Meanwhile, Pender is convinced the killer must be the husband of the last victim and sets out to capture him -- but he's only partly right. The husband is connected to the case, but the real murderers are a cunning husband-and-wife team of archeologists who believe that if they breathe in their victim's last breath they will live forever. Never before has Pender come up against such savvy, diabolical opponents. From one trail of dead ends to another, readers will feel Pender's fever to prevent more murders from occurring...and his sheer panic when he can't. Twenty-Seven Bones is that most quintessential of thrilling reads, providing a visceral experience of chills and excitement on every page.

The most terrifying novel you will read this year... There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand. And there are three dead bodies on the island of St. Luke - each victim missing a hand. It's the strangest, most disturbing series of murders the Caribbean has ever known - and one of the few crimes that could pull FBI Special Agent E.L. Pender out of retirement. In all of his years, he's never faced such a diabolical underworld drenched in superstition. At the heart of this darkness is a husband-and-wife team with a perverse plan so powerfully consuming, so brilliantly evil, that Pender can only watch and wait...as the grisly hand of fate reaches out for its next victim. ‘Explosive’ San Francisco Chronicle ‘Move over, Hannibal Lecter’ Scottish Daily Record ‘A first-rate thriller’ Boston Globe

The most terrifying novel you will read this year

For ten years, the charmingly disheveled veteran FBI Special Agent E.L. Pender has been investigating the apparently random disappearances of a dozen women across the country. The only detail the cases have in common is the strawberry blond color of the victims' hair, and the presence of a mystery man with whom they were last seen. Then, in Monterey, California, a routine traffic stop erupts into a scene of horrific violence. The local police are stunned by a disemboweled strawberry blond victim and an ingenious killer with multiple alternating personalities. Pender is convinced he has found his man, but before he can prove it, the suspect stages a cunning jailbreak and abducts his court-appointed psychiatrist, Irene Cogan. In a house on a secluded ridge in Oregon, Irene must navigate through the minefield of her captor's various egos -- male and female, brilliant and na ve, murderous and passive -- all of whom are dominated by Max, a seductive killer who views her as both his prisoner and his salvation. Irene knows that to survive she must play along with Max's game of sexual perversion. Only then will she be able to strip back the layers to discover a chilling story of a shattered young boy -- and all the girls he adored. A sexually charged thriller of extraordinary originality and page-turning suspense, The Girls He Adored moves furiously from the inner recesses of the psyche to its final, startling climax. Jonathan Nasaw brilliantly portrays two equally intense characters -- a deviant killer and the expert who can unlock his darkest secrets -- and introduces one of the most likable sleuths in recent fiction.

In his four previous novels of suspense, Jonathan Nasaw gave readers a charming and unlikely hero against the forces of evil in former FBI agent E.L. Pender. Now, in The Boys from Santa Cruz, Pender faces his most terrifying foe to date. Like James Patterson and John Connolly, Jonathan Nasaw has proven time and again that he has an uncanny, almost eerie, knack for getting inside the labyrinthine and horrifying minds of the most deranged serial killers. In Fear Itself, Nasaw first introduced Pender, a rumpled, endearingly flawed investigator who immediately won readers’ hearts. In The Girls He Adored, Pender defeated a perverted psycho named Max, then went on to face The Machete Man in Twenty-Seven Bones, called a “skin-crawling, gory psycho-thriller” by the Scottish Daily Record. When last we left Pender, in Nasaw’s sexually charged thriller When She Was Bad, he took on a pair of mentally insane killers and nearly lost himself in the dark and blood-drenched recesses of their two twisted psyches. With his lust for terror and a frightening talent for getting deep under his readers’ skins, Nasaw promises to deliver more gripping action and unimaginably gruesome detail as he introduces readers to the bloodthirsty The Boys from Santa Cruz.

A Thriller

The Boys from Santa Cruz

The most terrifying novel you will read this year... Max admits to killing the young woman whose still-warm, disembowelled body was found beside him - but he claims to be suffering from DID, a multiple-personality disorder and common alibi for murderers. Strawberry-blonde psychiatrist Irene Cogan is brought in to assess his claims and is astonished to find that Max has many more alters - or alternative personalities - than any DID sufferer she's previously encountered. But what Irene doesn't know is that one of those alters is a suspected serial killer the FBI know as Casey - a man responsible for the disappearance, and almost certain death, of several women. Women with just one thing in common - strawberry-blonde hair....

The Terrifying Serial Killer Thriller (FBI Agent E L Pender 1)

The most terrifying novel you will read this year... Just as he's celebrating his last day on the job, FBI agent E L Pender receives a letter from Dorie Bell. Dorie is afraid. Last year she attended a convention for Persons with Specific Phobia Disorder. Since then, a couple of the delegates have died in suspicious circumstances. Carl Polander had acrophobia. Fear of heights. So what would he be doing on the 12th floor of the building the police say he jumped from? Mara Agajanian had haemophobia. Fear of blood. So how could she have cut her own wrists in the bathtub? Dorie, who suffers from an irrational fear of masks, wants Pender to look into these cases. She suspects there may be a twisted serial killer on the loose. Someone, who quite literally, enjoys scaring his victims to death. Dorie's right. But she has no idea just how close to her the killer is...

"Er tötet mit der Präzision eines Hannibal Lecter. Er liebt und verwöhnt Frauen mit rotem Haar. Und er benimmt sich wie ein kleines, hilfsbedürftiges Kind. Doch man weiß nie, welche dieser drei Persönlichkeiten im Moment die Oberhand hat"--Page 4 of cover.

Jonathan Nasaw

Books

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