Blood Echo

by Pa Rock
Reader

Christopher Rice has been one of my favorite authors since the publication of his first novel, A Density of Souls" back in 2000 when he was only twenty-two-years-old.   Since that time I have read all of his books - save one which is currently waiting on the "read pile" next to my bed.  

In March of 2018 Rice published Bone Music, a book he indicated was to be the first in a thriller series with the same heroine, a young woman named Charlotte "Charley" Rowe.  Charley had been kidnapped as a young child by a family of serial killers who murdered her mother.   She was raised as a part of the serial killer family for several years until being rescued by the police and returned to her father, a man from who she and her mother had been estranged.  

Charley's father fabricated a history for Charley in which he portrayed her as having been an active participant within the serial killer family - and saying that she sometimes ran the furnace where the killers disposed of the bodies - hence her fan nickname "The Burning Girl."   Charley's father parlayed that fabrication into a traveling freak show that managed to make himself a nice income.    Charley realized what her father was doing, and she eventually left and went to live with her maternal grandmother in Altamira, California, a (fictional) small town located inland somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco.  The grandmother was a woman who befriended and protected Charley as a caring adult relative should.

When her grandmother died, Charley went into hiding in Arizona, trying to avoid fans and stalkers who had been drawn to the facts and fabrications about her former life in the family of serial killers.  She also used that time in the desert to try and establish herself as a functioning person through intensive therapy.  Unfortunately, her therapist in Arizona was aligned with an ethically-challenged scion of a family of pharmaceutical manufacturers who had an experimental drug that he wanted to try out on an appropriate test subject - a drug that would turn ordinary human beings into killer maniacs - and Charley unwittingly became weaponized and drawn into a plot to rid the world of many of its worst people.

Blood Echo is the second novel in the "Burning Girl Thriller Series."   As it opens Charley has again left the security of the small California town of Altamira and is on an assignment for the ethically-challenged drug manufacturer in which she is preparing to deal with a serial killer of young women.  She completes that chore in relatively short order, with a maximum of pain and bloodshed, and returns to her new developing "family" in Altamira.  Central to that family are Deputy Luke Prescott, now her live-in boyfriend but who had once been a bully toward her when they were in high school - and Martin "Marty" Cahill, the man who had been her grandmother's longterm boyfriend.   Both Luke and Marty know about Charley's work for Cole Graydon and Graydon Pharmaceuticals as they (Charley and Cole) endeavor to rid the world of its very worst people, and both Luke and Marty are as wary of Cole Graydon as they are protective of Charley.

And as Charley begins to recover from the serious physical trauma that she endured while bringing down the serial killer, she and her friends inadvertently get caught up in a web of domestic terrorism!

Like every previous book by Christopher Rice, the plotting in Blood Echo is tight and so fast-paced that the pages almost turn themselves!   It looks as though Mr Rice, who has several fine stand-alone novels to his credit, now has a successful series in the works as well.    

Christopher Rice is one of the best writers working in America today.   His novels are always well crafted, creative, compelling - and first-rate entertainment.  Blood Echo, like all of Mr. Rice's other works, is a great read!