The Echo Man

Mysterious Book Report No. 485

by John Dwaine McKenna

The Echo Man, (Crooked Lane, $26.99, 326 pages, ISBN 978-1-64385-991-0), the debut of author Sam Holland, is fascinating, frightening and utterly compelling reading . . . but you’d better be able to handle a lot of gore if you decide to give it a go . . . because it’s about serial killers.  Real ones.  And their depravity is on full display as a killer called “The Echo Man” by the newshounds, goes about the business of re-creating the terrible murders of psychos like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Charles Mansion, to name just a few.  There’s others.  Many of them, and equally as demented, but not as well known.

As the story begins, detectives Cara Elliott and Noah Deakin  are called to the scene of a brutal kidnapping and murder.  They discover the body of a young woman in the trunk of a 1965 Ford Galaxie who’s been brutally stabbed and murdered.  They don’t realize it at the time, but it’s a reenactment of a serial killing by a mass murderer named Edmund Kemper, and it’s only one of many to come.  At about the same time, a woman named Jessica Ambrose is burned out of her house . . . where her husband was killed in the fire.  Accused of murdering him, she’s soon on the run, when she meets a disgraced detective named Nate Griffin, who believes she’s innocent and decides to help her.  Together, they discover a shocking link between a series of unrelated appearing murders and realize that there’s a common thread.  Someone is restaging the crimes of some of the 20th century’s most appalling serial killers.  When Nate notifies Elliott and Deakin however, they instinctively push back in disbelief.  It seems that the three of them have a history.  But the truth is the truth, and it will not be denied.  After following up on the tip, the two cops discover that he’s right.  As a killer goes about staging more and more terrible murders he’s working up to what he calls his masterpiece.  With pressure mounting from the public and the police command, the race is on to apprehend the killer and clear Jessica’s name.  The savagery is unrelenting and the corpses keep coming in this terrific homage to the most awful crimes in human history.  You won’t be able to stop reading!!

 

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