Australian Penthouse

DEEPER THAN DEAD

Tami Hoag

Orion

IT’S 1985: A woman’s body is found, half-buried, in parkland by four 10-year-olds. The sleepy California town is shaken by the news that the murdered woman’s lips are glued shut; her eardrums pierced and her eyes blinded.

It becomes apparent that the woman is the third victim in a series of similar deaths—and that two of the three women had been residents of a women’s shelter. FBI agent Vince Leone is brought into the case by detective Tony Mendez, a cop who had taken one of Leone’s classes in the fledgling field of behavioural profiling, in a pre-DNA world, where prejudice of the ‘voodoo science’ of CSI and profiling is looked on with disdain by most older cops—especially by-the-numbers traffic cop Frank Farman—and with excitement by the new generation, such as Detective Mendez.

With the assistance of primary school teacher Anne Navarro, the FBI and State police interview the kids, their parents, and the centre’s staff in the hopes of discovering the killer. But in a town where appearance is everything, revealing the identity of a serial killer isn’t as easy as you might expect.