"Strong suspense thriller"

The Game Master kept a memento from each of his victims to remind him of the euphoria of hearing the Sophomore, the Wife, and the Nurse scream until their blood stopped flowing. His next intended victim, the Professor, seems perfect for his tastes though he ponders what he will take from her as his keepsake. He assumes she should prove the easiest because her farmhouse borders nothing except a remote isolated swamp.

Professor Liz Clark teaches history at Somerville College in Dover, Delaware. She feels pretty good about her work and her personal life as she has hunks to choose from for a change. She fantasizes sleeping with the grad student, her former boyfriend, or the wheelchair-bound ex cop. However, her sexual dreams turn into a nightmare when Liz finds the brutally slashed corpse of Tracy Fleming a sophomore in her office. Unbeknownst to her, that is a gift from a serial killer who plans to make the Professor his next victim.

Suspense thriller fans will not be AT RISK reading Judith E French's terrific tension driven tale. Interestingly most of the cast is two dimensional, which adds psychological intrigue to the exhilarating story line as the one fully developed person Liz (and readers) has no idea who is stalking her or why. Instead the culprit remains murky except in terms of serial killing. Will the Game Master check mate Liz who seems to have no allies or will she survive this murdering machine; fans will read this book in one sitting to learn what happens to Liz.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted June 12, 2005

Summary

Historical romance veteran French's first contemporary romantic suspense novel ably evokes an appealing locale, then bogs down in cliché and contrivance. In coastal Delaware, a serial killer who calls himself the Game Master has been stashing his victims' bones in underwater crab traps. Soon after he murders a student of Dr. Elizabeth Clarke in her office at upscale Somerville College, Lizzy begins to receive ominous phone calls, "gifts" of funeral wreaths and dead animals, and visits from a marauder who steals nothing, yet makes his presence inside her home known. Lizzy is suspicious of three people-a smarmy grad student, the security expert who's her best friend and her ex-boyfriend, the ex-con Jack Rafferty. As Jack and Lizzy reunite for both romance and detection, neither emerges as a coherent character. The Game Master, too, comes across as a grab bag of standard pop-culture serial-killer symptoms rather than a convincing figure. French (The Conqueror) never resolves his contradictions nor the many holes in her plot, such as how a well-known man can target, travel and kill so widely without arousing comment from a community depicted as small, gossipy and close-knit.