Watch Me

A. J. Holt

Average Rating 6/10 (1 Review)

The Iceman took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Still no sound except the faint rustling of the suit. It was time. He hadn't felt this good since Phoenix and he could hardly wait to spread the news: life was good, but death was even better. Smiling happily, he headed up the stairs, letting his mind fill with thoughts of Ellen Putnam and her young daughter, his heart swelling with joy at what was to come...

FBI agent Jay Fletcher is more than just a woman with a mission. Her life is her work, using her computer genius to bring to justice some of America's most brutal murderers. Her special project is C-BIX, a criminal- profiling programme capable of narrowing a list of suspects to a relevant handful, a tool on the brink of reaping rich rewards for her agency, a tool capable of saving lives. But somehow Jay isn't the heroine she should be. To her superiors at the FBI she's looking increasingly like a liability, her methods of tracking down the monsters that are her daily stock-in-trade endangering the Agency's position before the law. So Jay Fletcher is in disgrace, sidelined for an indefinite period to assisting a fire-investigation unit in Santa Fe.

But Jay cannot bear to walk away from her work on C- BIX. And when she gets wind of a local serial killer, she can't resist trying to track him down. C-I3IX is stunningly successful and when Jay homes in on the killer's seedy lair she finds the haul of her career - an Internet network of serial killers hidden behind a computer role-playing game. Crossing the line between law and vengeance, between order and madness, Jay begins to track down the network's members and one by one bring them her own brand of swift justice, while the monstrous leader of the group, the Iceman, remains a single step ahead of her. Eventually, pursued by her own desperate demons from the past, Jay Fletcher must come face to face with a terrible troth: you set a thief to catch a thief, and to catch a serial killer she's become the very thing she abhors...

Highly topical, frighteningly relevant and utterly unputdownable, Watch Me offers a terrifying glimpse into the tortured mind of a serial killer and the equally tortured soul of the woman who has vowed to bring him down - one way or another...

Review by Chrissi (100600) Rating (6/10)

Review by Chrissi
Rating 6/10
This is an American FBI Thriller type novel, the heroine of which is a computer expert. After using an illegal computer programme to assist with solving a crime, she is banished to smalltime america to assist with setting up a computer system for an arson investigation unit.

This does not prevent her from getting involved with a serial killer who mutilates women in a very specific manner. She cannot help herself and starts after him. It gets confusing when he seems to be in contact with other serial killers on a website, kind of like a support group I suppose.

Things get slightly screwy when she starts tracking all members of this group down. Unfortunately she is not the most sympathetic character, and although you know that she is in the right, you are not as caught up in her quest as you could have been.

That said, I do enjoy good technical detail, even if computers are not my favourite objects, although I do enjoy a good psychopath! I would have liked her to have had more purpose than just seemingly to go where the events and the computer system led her. I would certainly read more by this author. (And there is another that I have got to review soon...)
Chrissi (10th June 2000)