Ashes, Ashes

by Charles Atkins

Overview

From page one, the chase is on and many will die unnecessarily.
Forensic psychiatrist, Ms Barrett Conyors knew that if Richard Glash weren't manacled to his chair, he would kill her. He had likely imagined every detail of her murder and then obsessively sketched the scene hundreds of times. At forty-two Richard, who'd spent all but four and a half years of his life locked away, had few interests, other than drawing. And killing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847515773
Publisher:	Severn House Publishers
Publication date:	05/01/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Charles Atkins is a practising psychiatrist, writer, professional speaker and member of the clinical faculty at Yale. He is the author of several psychological thrillers, as well as numerous short stories, articles and essays, and two non-fiction books. He is also the author of the new, well-regarded mystery series featuring elderly sleuths Lil and Ada.

Editorial Reviews

"Taut, mind-blowing suspense, a thoroughly evil protagonist, and unexpected twists throughout make this a genuinely gripping thriller—great reading for Chelsea Cain fans"

Booklist

"Taut, mind-blowing suspense, a thoroughly evil protagonist, and unexpected twists throughout make this a genuinely gripping thriller—great reading for Chelsea Cain fans"

Booklist

This lackluster thriller from Atkins (The Cadaver's Ball) strains reader credulity to the breaking point. Attractive forensic psychiatrist Barrett Conyors receives an emergency call on the way to her Manhattan gynecologist to terminate the pregnancy caused by the rapist who killed her husband. She must act immediately to try to block a judge's decision to transfer four extremely dangerous murderers from a maximum security prison in Stormville, N.Y., to a less secure facility in Croton. When the transfer goes through, Richard Glash, the deadliest of the inmates, escapes and gets his hands on some bubonic plague. In addition, Glash takes two hostages, Conyors and Carla Phelps, her legal adversary (and a former patient she'd diagnosed as bipolar), who desperately try to stop his plan to unleash the Black Death on New York City. Unconvincing actions sequences undercut the suspense.
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Publishers Weekly

Atkins's fifth thriller focuses on a killer who comes on like Hannibal Lecter, only less worldly, less cultivated and a lot more ambitious. When he was four years old, Richard Glash's father killed his adulterous mother. Soon after, Glash tried to scalp a neighborhood girl and was sent away for the first of several prison terms that occupy him for the next 40 years. If clinical psychiatrist Barrett Conyors had her way, he'd be behind bars for the rest of his life. But his attorney, Carla Phelps, is exploiting a new wrinkle in the justice system to petition for his release to a less restrictive environment, and on the way there, he escapes all restrictions in true Lecter fashion. Within moments he's grabbed a pair of wildly unlikely hostages and led the police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security on a desperate chase to find him before he can execute a series of audacious homicides on behalf of three other imprisoned murderers. Despite some clunky exposition, the chase takes off with irresistible momentum till halfway through, when a change in hostages indicates a shifting pattern in Glash's violence and a dramatic increase in its scale. Though Atkins (The Prodigy, 2007, etc.) is more successful making you worry about the fate of those first two hostages than about Glash's diabolical threat to millions of New Yorkers, nobody who starts this clever, maximum-velocity nail-biter will leave it unfinished.

Kirkus Reviews