Savage Art: A Chilling Serial Killer Thriller - Softcover

Girard, Danielle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 099630892X ISBN 13: 9780996308922

Publisher: Saddle Peak Entertainment, 2019

Synopsis

Danielle Girard’s Debut Novel.

Death was his art. She would be his masterpiece.

They called him Leonardo—a master skilled in the art of murder. One year ago, Cincinnati was his canvas. A scalpel was his tool. And women were his works-in-progress. FBI profiler Casey McKinley was one of them, a victim of Leonardo's twisted genius. She has the scars—and the nightmares—to prove it.

For Casey, a new city means a life far from the one she left behind in Cincinnati. In San Francisco she finally feels safe. Until a series of eerily familiar slayings plunges her back into Leonardo's game. 

Now she must catch this clever killer before he can unveil his ultimate masterpiece. Only this time she'll play by a different set of rules—hers.

“Scary fast action. Hard to put down. Lock your doors and turn on the lights. This has one terrifying villain."

“Well, it's 4:00 am and my heart is racing...This was a real thriller all the way through.” 

“I lost sleep reading this book, I could not put the book down. If you like suspense, intense characters, action, and a great story, this is for you.”

About this title

Review

Danielle Girard's first novel, Savage Art, is a thriller with a Jeffery Deaveresque twist. Casey McKinley was one of the FBI's most prolific criminal profilers, until she herself fell victim to a serial killer nicknamed Leonardo da Vinci for his horrifically precise scalpel work on still-living victims. Casey survived the attack, deeply shocked and permanently disabled. Two years later, she is a broken woman, having lost her family, her work, and all but the most primitive use of her hands.

Casey's problems have only just begun. Leonardo is obsessed with her and intent upon finishing his job. But he has a roundabout way of proceeding: he selectively murders little girls, ages 5 or 6, whose mothers look just like Casey. This key bit of information is deduced by San Francisco Police Detective Jordan Gray, who, like Casey, is obsessively devoted to catching the killer. Even as Casey and Jordan make steady progress in locating Leonardo, his pace increases rapidly, and Casey is in greater peril as those closest to her become the killer's targets.

Savage Art is a by-the-numbers thriller that delivers all the necessary pieces but little more. Girard explores Casey's psychology in the first half of the book, before the plot demands full narrative attention, and these moments distinguish the novel from others of its kind. Leonardo and Jordan, by contrast, lack anything that would mark them as different from the prototypical monstrous killer and righteous cop. The occasional logical error mars the plot--Casey should know the difference, for example, between a local power outage that blacks out traffic signals and an outage that the killer has rigged to her apartment. These aside, however, Savage Art ratchets up the fear quotient very effectively to keep readers glued to the book through the last page. --Kathi Inman Berens

About this edition

• Publisher: Saddle Peak Entertainment
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 099630892X
• ISBN 13: 9780996308922
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 434