Nothing Human - Hardcover

Ronald Munson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067173024X ISBN 13: 9780671730246

Publisher: Atria, 1991

Synopsis

Attractive to women, educated, and charming, John Haack is the last man Lieutenant Eric Firecaster would suspect is a serial killer, but when Haack threatens Jill, the woman Firecaster is protecting, the cop learns that looks can be deceiving

About this title

About the Author:

Ronald Munson is the author of a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction. Raising the Dead was named a National Library Association Best Book in Science and Medicine, and Intervention and Reflection is the nation’s most widely used bioethics book. His novel Fan Mail received a starred review in Kirkus, was a best seller in German translation, and was produced as a radio play. His three previously published novels have been translated into various languages, including Japanese, Swedish, and Dutch. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Harvard University, as well as a Scholar in Residence at Harvard College’s Lowell House.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Here's an unusual fiction debut: a formulaic but tight and swift serial-killer thriller--by a professor of philosophy of science and medicine (at the Univ. of Missouri). Munson's background, which also includes teaching at Harvard Medical School's Dept. of Psychiatry, shows in his rich display of forensic detail and in his careful construction of the bent mind of the killer, John Haack. Calling himself ``the Jaguar,'' and believing himself some sort of Mayan god, Haack, a formerly abused child now working in a Cambridge bookstore, has been terrorizing that town by stalking young women, then scattering their headless corpses. Leading the hunt for Haack is Lieutenant Eric Firecaster, an appealingly thoughtful hero who once studied philosophy at Harvard, while caught between the two is Haack's unwitting next mark, Jill Brenner, a free-lance journalist who, like the killer's past victims, patronizes his bookstore. After Haack begins toying with Jill--following her, breaking into her apartment--she goes to the cops and meets Firecaster, who immediately falls for her (the feeling is mutual) and pegs her as a likely Jaguar target. But Firecaster isn't around to protect Jill when Haack smuggles an apparently deadly snake into her bedroom, or comes after her at Firecaster's house--two suspenseful attacks that Jill escapes by dint of her refreshingly resilient wits. A would-be suitor of Jill's fares less well when a jealous Jaguar kidnaps him to his lair beneath an abandoned hospital wing, to torture and kill; the same lair provides the spookily gothic setting for a long, tense climax as Haack, disguised as a character from Dune, lures Jill out of an sf convention she's covering--with Firecaster in close pursuit.... Lacks the psychological depth of, say, Thomas Harris, but vivid characters and a hurtling plotline add up to sleek and sure escapist entertainment, just right for its beach-time publication date. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 067173024X
• ISBN 13: 9780671730246
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 303