Collecting Cooper

Description

From the international bestselling author comes yet another gripping novel that paints a brutally vivid picture of a killer's mind. An edge-of-your-seat thriller, for fans of Lee Child and Peter May. 'A pulse-pounding serial killer thriller' Publishers Weekly 'Cleave uses words like lethal weapons' New York Times Book Review People are disappearing in Christchurch. Cooper Riley, a psychology professor, doesn't make it to work one day. Emma Green, one of his students, doesn't make it home. When ex-cop Theodore Tate is released from a four-month prison stint, he's asked by Green's father to help find Emma. After all, Tate was in jail for nearly killing her in a DUI accident the year before, so he owes him. Big time. What neither of them knows is that a former mental patient is holding people prisoner as part of his growing collection of serial killer souvenirs. Now he has acquired the ultimate collector's item - an actual killer. Meanwhile, clues keep pulling Tate back to Grover Hills, the mental institution that closed down three years ago. Very bad things happened there. Those who managed to survive would prefer to keep their memories buried. Tate has no choice but to unearth Grover Hills' dark past if there is any chance of finding Emma Green and Cooper Riley alive. For fans of Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island, Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs, and Jeff Lindsay's Dexter series, Collecting Cooper is another 'relentlessly gripping, deliciously twisted, and shot through with a vein of humor that's as dark as hell' (Mark Billingham) novel by this glimmering talent in the crime thriller genre.

Paul Cleave is an award-winning author who divides his time between his home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, where all his novels are set, and Europe, where none of his novels are set. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages and have sold over a million copies. He's won the Ngaio Marsh Award three times, the Saint-Maur book festival's crime novel of the year award, has been shortlisted for the Edgar, the Barry and the Ned Kelly Awards. When he's not at home with the stereo cranked up loud and working on his next novel, he can normally be found on a tennis court, a golf course, or throwing a Frisbee somewhere.

Cleave leads us on a tantalizing, mouth-watering spectre of horror, never knowing what will be revealed around the next corner, or turning of a page. This is one in a series of novels centered on Detective Tate and he withholds just enough to make you want to get that next book now! * Suspense Magazine * The cynical, ambiguous conclusion to this wild, violent romp really makes you wonder about Cleave. And his fans ... and me. I couldn't put it down * Mystery Scene Magazine * Collecting Cooper roars on at breakneck speed, pitting not two but three deadly adversaries against an inexorably ticking clock * BookPage * Horrormeister Cleave ... will scare you to death, or at least to the point of keeping a night light on * Kirkus Reviews * Paul Cleave writes the kind of dark, intense thrillers that I never want to end. Do yourself a favour and check him out -- Simon Kernick A pulse-pounding serial killer thriller ... The city of Christchurch becomes a modern equivalent of James Ellroy's Los Angeles of the 1950s, a discordant symphony of violence and human weakness * Publishers Weekly (starred) *