Nothing Human

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

YA-- John Haak, a violent, calculating psychopath, tortures and mutilates his female victims as an offering to the Mayan god of death. Jill Brenner, a writer recovering from her lover's suicide, is targeted as his next victim. In the course of investigating the serial killings around Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently divorced homicide detective Eric Firecaster becomes romantically involved with Jill. While the characters are well-fleshed out, the love interest between Firecaster and Brenner seems forced as a necessary plot element. As with the novels Silence of the Lambs (St. Martin, 1989) by Thomas Harris and Funeral March (Bantam, 1991) by Frank De Felitta , Nothing Human is packed with gut-wretching realism. Munson combines all the detail of a police report with the tension of a coiled spring.
- John Lawson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Munson's outstanding debut novel presents John Haack, an intelligent, attractive man who leads a double life as Jaguar, a sadistic killer who decapitates his victims. This criminal is especially frightening because he insinuates himself so smoothly into the workaday world of Cambridge, Mass. Jaguar uses an exceptionally shrewd MO, methodically tracking his prey and giving them scary warnings. His latest obsession is Jill Brenner, a freelance writer recovering from the suicide of her lover. When she senses Jaguar's presence in her home, she contacts police lieutenant Eric Firecaster, a Harvard grad rebounding from a failed marriage. Munson creates a bristling, tense ambience with scenes like Jill's encounter with a snake left by Jaguar in her bedroom. Jill refuses to be a willing victim, choosing instead to outhunt the hunter. Munson, a professor at the University of Missouri who has also taught in Harvard Medical School's psychiatry department, gives excellent insights into Haack, whose psychosis stems from his rejection in childhood by his neurosurgeon mother. His earliest outlet having been science fiction, he now identifies specifically with the noble Paul Atreides of Frank Herbert's Dune and poses as him at Boscon, a science fiction convention also attended by Jill. Their deadly showdown caps a fine mix of sharp plot twists, believable characterizations and sophisticated writing.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.