The Dead Place

An anonymous caller phones the police with a promise: a killing is coming, soon, and it will be carried out to perfection. Detectives Ben Cooper and Diane Fry hope he is only a crank amusing himself with a sick joke. The clues threaded through his messages suggest otherwise.

Their doubts grow when a woman vanishes from an office parking garage. The caller describes his death rituals in detail, and those details match the strange way an unidentified woman's body was left in the woods, exposed for more than a year.

Cooper gets a positive identification for the dead woman, and it complicates the case. Nobody ever reported her missing, and she was definitely not murdered. So the link between her and the caller is harder to explain than it first looked.

As the caller draws Ben and Diane further into his confidence, they learn a great deal about his obsession with death. They still do not know who he is, or who he plans to kill next.

This is a police procedural crime novel with a menacing tone. The tension comes from the calls and from a corpse that does not fit the pattern the detectives expect.