No Witnesses (Boldt and Matthews Series #3)

by Ridley Pearson

Overview

Product tampering. Innocent lives. Nice suburban homes. A Seattle food company is victim to an ingenious extortion that has the FBI two steps behind. Seattle's veteran homicide sergeant, Lou Boldt, and police psychologist Daphne Matthews approach the case from opposite ends: one undearthing micoscopic evidence, the other putting together a chilling psychological profile of a man willing to contaminate and kill if necessary.

The cop Daphne Matthews secretly loves is being destroyed by the extortion. Boldt sees his department cracking. As the high-tech manhunt builds to a furious crescendo, Boldt and Matthews are jolted again: the madman they're hunting may not be working alone . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781401305178
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	08/14/2012
Series:	Boldt and Matthews Series , #3
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	88,306
File size:	524 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ridley Pearson is the award-winning co-author, along with Dave Barry, of Peter and the Starcatchers, Peter and the Shadow Thieves, Peter and the Secret of Rundoon, Peter and the Sword of Mercy, Escape From the Carnivale, Cave of the Dark Wind, Blood Tide, and Science Fair. In addition to Kingdom Keepers: Disney After Dark, Kingdom Keepers: Disney at Dawn, Kingdom Keepers: Disney in Shadow, and Kingdom Keepers: Power Play, he is also the author of the young adult thrillers Steel Trapp: The Challenge and Steel Trapp: The Academy. He has written more than twenty best-selling crime novels, including Killer View and Killer Weekend. He was the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction at Oxford University.

Hometown:

St. Louis, Missouri

Date of Birth:

March 13, 1953

Place of Birth:

Glen Cove, New York

Education:

Kansas University, B.A., Brown University

Website:

http://www.ridleypearson.com/

Editorial Reviews

A rare humanism and meticulous attention to procedural detail have marked Pearson's thrillers featuring Seattle cop Lou Boldt (Undercurrents; The Angel Maker). In the mournful detective's third match-up against a maniacal serial killer, Pearson outdoes himself by eschewing scenes from the murderer's point of view (and the pandering to bloodlust inherent in such scenes) in order to focus solely on the terrible toll wrought on victims and cops. Here the villain is tampering with products of Adler Foods, a giant company that he or she blames for a long-ago crime. The bodies of poisoned children and adults turn up everywhere as Boldt and his SPD/FBI task force, including series regular Daphne Matthews, a police psychologist, race to ID and trap the killer. Instead of forensic detail, Pearson this time highlights high-tech procedures: computer warfare against the killer's use of ATMs to collect a ransom; cutting-edge surveillance techniques. A tangled subplot about a possible culprit among the cops drags the suspense slightly but some extraordinarily tense cat-and-mousing between cops and killer more than makes up for it. This is a serial-killer novel that speaks to readers' hearts even as it jangles their nerves-and it's not to be missed. $150,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections; author tour. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Wealthy food industry mogul Owen Adler receives a series of FAXes demanding that he liquidate his business and commit suicide within a month. The alternative is that consumers of Adler Foods will begin to die. After the deadline passes and two children are hospitalized with a mysterious infection, Adler lets his girlfriend, Seattle forensic psychologist Daphne Matthews, contact detective Lou Boldt. Boldt's empathy for the rising number of victims compels him to put his life at risk as he coordinates an extended investigation while trying to prevent mass panic. Coincidences figure prominently in the plot, yet the genuine humanness of Boldt and Matthews and the breakneck speed of the action will please fans of Pearson (The Angel Maker, Delacorte, 1993). For most public libraries. [Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections.]-V. Louise Saylor, Eastern Washington Univ. Lib., Cheney

Library Journal

A crime without a crime scene? That's the scenario in Ridley Pearson's latest thriller starring Seattle detective Lou Boldt and police psychiatrist Daphne Matthews. A brilliant but deeply disturbed young man with a big-time grudge against the owner of a frozen-food company decides to take his revenge by poisoning the company's products, first with cholera, then with strychnine. Ugly deaths follow, but the man responsible stays far out of reach, faxing extortion letters from a laptop over public-telephone lines and retrieving ransoms electronically, through ATM transfers. Boldt, a master at close analysis of forensic evidence, is stymied: without a crime scene, a place where the criminal is known to have been, there are no physical links to his identity and, of course, no witnesses. As the harried detective struggles to find a forensic trail through vaporous electronic backroads, Matthews works the psychological soil, creating mental fingerprints in the absence of physical ones. As in past Bold-Matthews adventures--"Undercurrents" (1988) and "The Angel Maker" (1993)--the combination of meticulous investigative detail and excruciating, screw-tightening suspense is utterly riveting. The personal dramas that serve as subplots--Matthews involvement with the frozen-food mogul and Boldt's struggle to balance work and home--add texture, but, finally, like Boldt himself, we are obsessed with the case and come to resent our heroes' personal lives for taking us away from the action even momentarily. The serial-killer novel is a much-abused genre these days; it is as if the success of "Silence of the Lambs" has spawned a whole generation of literary copycat killers. Prosecute the copycats but, by all means, don't include Pearson among them. He elevates any genre in which he chooses to work, and right now he's the best thriller writer alive.

Bill Ott