The Last Dead Girl by Harry Dolan

 

After the DNF last night, I grabbed a book by an author I've enjoyed in the past, and ... oh, boy, this is a really good thriller/crime novel. It's set in 1998, so there's less in the way of ubiquitous communication, and computers are mostly desktops, but everything else mostly works the way you'd expect and the time allows Dolan to write this as a novel about a character he's written two other novels about, before those other two novels happen. There's never any real doubt the main's going to survive, but there's plenty of other tension--and the novel does kinda answer some questions about how the character in those other novels got that way. The story unfurls kinda slowly, but that just makes some of the later twists a little tighter., The characters are all well-defined, even (especially) the ones with secrets that unravel during the novel, and the first murder victim to appear in the novel (there's a bit of nonlinearity) turns out to have been an impressive young woman, her murder turns out to be more tragic, the long-tail result of someone else's bad choices (in addition, of course, to the murderer's needs). As mentioned, it's a prequel, but it's remarkably self-contained: You don't need to know the other novels to understand this one.