Book Review: Hunted by Proxy (Proxy Legal Thriller, #2) by Manning Wolfe

Hunted By Proxy: A Lawyer On The Run Action Suspense Thriller by Manning Wolfe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This series just keeps getting better!

Hunted by Proxy is the second book in author Manning Wolfe’s excellent Proxy Legal Thriller series, featuring the hiding-in-plain-sight criminal defense attorney Quinton Bell, and what a fabulous follow-up to its debut it is! From its heart-wrenching opening to its dazzling surprise of a conclusion, I was riveted by this exciting and absorbing story.

Quinton Bell is a complex character, to say the least. Living a lie to escape his past, he’s endured a lot and is feeling the stress of maintaining his masquerade as a dead man. The author gets us right inside Quinton’s head, and you can almost feel the pressure he’s under, especially with the knowledge that someone out there knows his secret and is using it to toy with him. His legal work is fascinating to read, even the requisite administrative hearings, and the author clearly knows her way around a courtroom and how to convey that to the layperson reader.

Soon into the story, it is revealed that someone knows who Quinton Bell really is, and naturally, he’s spooked. But as days passed and things began to happen, such as the odd sightings of people that quickly disappeared, I, too, started to get the willies. When Quinton said he felt like he was being watched, I knew exactly how he felt. The reader is privy to the thoughts and actions of this stalker but not who is pulling his strings, and when that big reveal happened, I was fully and completely surprised. The story sets up for a next book, and I, for one, am already waiting.

I have to mention the opening sequence, a massive traffic accident on the I-10 between Houston and Katy, was horrifyingly real – a slow-motion rendering of certain death, critical injuries, and destruction. The author gives the perfect introduction to the main characters involved, so I was immediately engaged and already cared about these people when the scene unfolded.

I recommend HUNTED BY PROXY to mystery and thriller readers who enjoy legal dramas, secret identities, and mob-related stories.

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Book Review - The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys by Lise Olsen

The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys by Lise Olsen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fascinating recounting of the identification of the last of Houston’s Candy Man serial killer’s victims.

The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston’s Lost Boys by Lise Olsen is a meticulously researched and amazingly detailed accounting of one woman’s dedicated work to finally reunite some of the long-unidentified victims from the early 1970s serial killer known as “The Candy Man” with their names and families.

In a three-year period during the early 1970s, Dean Arnold Corll, with the help of two teenaged accomplices, abducted, tortured, assaulted, and murdered at least 29 boys and male teens in the Houston and Pasadena cities of Texas. Author Lise Olsen reveals the story by alternating between how the victims came to be introduced to their murderer and 30 years later as Dr. Sharon Derrick, Ph.D., an experienced bioarchaeologist pursuing a career in forensic anthropology, works to match the still unidentified victims with whom they were in life. Even with the focus on the processes Derrick went through, the story is riveting, and readers will not want to put the book down.

The story is fascinating for a number of reasons, one being that even with the advancements in science and the tools available to help identify anonymous corpses (from 1973 when the bodies were uncovered to the mid-2000s when Derrick’s journey begins), Dr. Derrick still faced an extraordinarily difficult and complex task. Thirty years and more had passed from the victims’ deaths and their rough burials in unprotected, unmarked graves, the evidence degrading even further. Possible family members of the dead had moved around, moved on, or passed on themselves, eliminating useful sources of information for identification. DNA identification was still a much sought-after and months-long process, and commercial DNA testing for the general public, such as 23 and Me or Ancestry.com, was still years away. On top of that, the original law enforcement reporting and handling of the missing person’s reports in Houston were given little attention. In addition to this, law enforcement and its tools were quite different then. The 70s were pre-community policing, pre-Amber Alerts, pre-cellphones, pre-personal computers, pre-Internet, and even pre-in-patrol-vehicle-computer monitors connected to centralized policing software. Houston PD didn’t see the connection among the reports of missing boys clustered in certain neighborhoods, indicating there was a bigger problem than runaways: no one did until after Corll had been killed by one of his teenage accomplices who confessed what he knew.

The story of Derrick’s determination despite so many obstacles, both in the evidence and in the situation, is pretty amazing. Each case has fascinating elements to it, and her work finally puts a name to tragic victim after tragic victim. The author’s presentation of how this was accomplished is compelling and heart-wrenching, as after each successful identification, she provides a photo of the victim with a summary of his short life. It really brings home that, at one time, these were real, living, breathing children who laughed and played, had hopes and dreams, families and friends, with their entire lives still ahead of them. More than fifty years later, their heartbreaking stories are finally being completed.

I recommend THE SCIENTIST AND THE SERIAL KILLER to readers of non-fiction, especially those who enjoy true crime or forensics.

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advanced Review Copy from the author through "Lone Star Book Campaigns."

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