Introduction

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...

Editorial Review

E.L. Pender, the FBI agent introduced in Nasaw's previous mystery (The Girls He Adored, is a few days short of retirement when he gets a letter from a California woman with an unlikely premise--that the deaths of three people who, like her, attended a conference for people suffering from a variety of phobias (some very strange indeed) were not the random accidents they appeared to be, but the work of a serial killer. Once Pender meets Dorie Bell, the letter writer, he believes her, and with the help of a gutsy agent sidelined from an active career in the FBI by her recently diagnosed MS, he tracks the murderer--the man who bankrolled the conference in order to meet his victims, learn their vulnerabilities, and use their fears to kill them. The sociopathic villain of this suspenseful novel is a sort of junior-grade Hannibal Lecter who gets his bloody comeuppance in the end; having written him out of the picture, and set Pender up for retirement, one wonders who the resourceful author will turn to for his next thriller. --Jane Adams

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