Scream For Me

Karen Rose
Grand Central Publishing (2008)
ISBN 9780446509206
Reviewed by Nikki Pringle for Reader Views (6/08)


Special Agent Daniel Vartanian has just returned to his job at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation after spending the last two weeks in Philadelphia helping local law enforcement track down a serial killer who claimed 17 lives. The killer was Daniel’s younger brother, Simon, whom everyone had thought to be dead for over a decade. Daniel and Simon’s father, Judge Vartanian, knew the truth. He was the one who used the sins from his younger son’s years in Dutton to blackmail him in to staying away. Then he told everyone Simon had died and staged a funeral for his son. The judge’s bad decision allowed Simon to continue his evil ways and claim amongst his victims, the Judge and his wife.

Alex Fallon works as an ER nurse in Cincinnati. She moved to Ohio from Georgia when she was 16-years-old. Taken in by her aunt and uncle after the murder of her twin sister, suicide of her mother, and her own attempted suicide, Alex hasn’t returned to her hometown of Dutton since. Then she gets a call telling her that Bailey, the daughter of her mother’s live-in boyfriend all those years ago, has gone missing. Alex is listed as the emergency contact for Bailey’s 5-year-old daughter Hope, whom Alex never knew existed, and she is forced to return to Dutton to care for Hope as she tries to figure out if Bailey left of her own volition or was taken against her will.

Daniel’s first day back at work is a busy one. He gets a call about a body found in a ditch. The female victim has been beaten and suffocated, then wrapped in a brown blanket and left in a conspicuous area to be found easily by anyone passing by. One of the medics on the scene mentions that the case is eerily reminiscent of one he worked 13 years before, from the injuries the victim sustained down to the blanket she was left in. That victim was named Alicia Tremaine and she was a 16-year-old high-school student from Dutton. Alicia’s mother killed herself the day her daughter’s body was found, and her twin sister Alex also attempted to take her own life that day. Alicia’s killer was never found. Is there a copycat on the loose, or, as more people with ties to Dutton disappear and more victims are located, is someone trying to send a message to the locals and law enforcement about sins of the past?

Karen Rose does an excellent job tying the characters past and present lives together. Dutton is no Mayberry, and as the story plays out you are left to wonder just how many of the townsfolk are involved in the ugliness from the past and the dark clouds looming over the present. Scenes pass by quickly when the action is meant to be fast-paced and languidly when it is not. Fans of mystery writers like Tami Hoag and Tess Gerritsen will be pleased with Karen Rose’s latest novel. In “Scream For Me,” fear is palpable, the terror is thick enough to be cut with a knife and the physical attraction pumping through Daniel and Alex’s veins can’t be denied.

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