The Dancing Girls by M. M. Chouinard

 

I am honestly puzzled as to how or why this is Book One of a series--it makes no sense from an author's, publisher's, or reader's perspective. The characters who would presumably be the recurring characters--the Series Name Detective and the others in her office--accomplish approximately nothing: The serial killer they're chasing gets himself killed by a-fucking-nother serial killer, in a moment that bizarrely reminds me of some Roger Zelazny short stories from like the 1980s or early 1990s ("Itself Surprised," about one of Saberhagen's Berserkers encountering a remnant from the war of their origin, something built to kill Berserkers; and a story I do not remember the title of, about something that preys on vampires interacting with vampire hunters). I guess the serial killer meeting victims through the chat function of World of Warcraft (and communicating further via Skype) would have been a thing in the early 2010s when this novel was written, but even now feels almost as dated as Francis Dolarhyde in *Red Dragon* finding the families he killed when he processed the film from their movie cameras.