The Last Move

FBI agent and criminal profiler Kate Hayden has spent years trying not to think about San Antonio. The last time she worked a case there, chasing a serial killer the press called the Samaritan, it ended with her partner dead and Kate shot. A man went to prison for it, and she has never been entirely sure he was the right one.

Now a new body has turned up staged exactly the way the Samaritan staged his — a killing dressed as a suicide — and Kate is back in Texas, working with homicide detective Theo Mazur, a Chicago transplant who moved south to be near his daughter. A second victim follows, echoing another case Kate believed was closed.

Mary Burton's The Last Move opens the Criminal Profiler series with a killer who has clearly studied his profiler, and a chess-game of a plot in which every move is aimed at Kate personally.