Retribution: 1 (C.J. Townsend Thriller) - Softcover

Hoffman, Jilliane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1477849548 ISBN 13: 9781477849545

Synopsis

C.J. Townsend is a brilliant prosecutor known for keeping her cool even when trying the most horrific cases. The latest: an accused serial killer who savors cruelty and considers murder an art. But this case is different. C.J. recognizes the suspect. She knows what he s capable of. After all these years, she still has the nightmares to prove it. Now she s walking the fine line between justice and revenge. Even C.J. isn t prepared for where it will take her."

About this title

Review

Jilliane Hoffman's first novel Retribution takes the stock material of the forensic thriller and the woman-in-jeopardy modern Gothic and combines them with an intelligent meditation on justice. When Banting is caught with an eviscerated blonde in the boot of his car, prosecutor Chloe thinks she has got bang to rights a serial killer she and her police allies have been tracking for months. When she realises that he is the man who raped her and left her for dead twelve years earlier, it only makes her more certain--and more determined to send him to his death and not stand down from a trial in which she cannot possibly be objective. Yet nothing is quite as it seems.

Hoffman is entirely on top of both the small telling details from which a convincing criminal case is built up and the combination of intense concentration and deep personal damage that Chloe brings to her work and to surviving; she makes depression and stress as much a matter of white-knuckle excitement as more obvious dangers. This is an intelligent thriller that makes no pretence at having final answers to the matters of life and death that it raises. --Roz Kaveney

Review

This American former prosecutor's crime thriller is superlative and deserves to have sold for "unprecedented sums throughout the world". A law student is raped and tortured in her own New York apartment by a masked man. Still in emotional hell 12 years later with her looks and name disguised so the perpetrator - whoever he is - cannot track her down, she has become one of the state prosecutors in Florida and faces in court a psycho arrested for the most gruesome serial killings of women. Immediately she recognises his voice. The plot storms along from peaks of terror to resoluteness to anguished nightmare, with just enough love interest to give moments of respite from the macabre. A dream of a debut thriller.

About this edition

• Publication date: 1847
• ISBN 10: 1477849548
• ISBN 13: 9781477849545
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 479