Trail of Blood
Theresa MacLean Mystery, No 3
Lisa Black

Harper (Reprint)
July 26th, 2011 /ISBN 978-0061989360
Suspense
Amazon

Reviewed by Susan Johnson

As a young girl growing up in Cleveland, Ohio Theresa MacLean loved to listen to the scary stories her Grandfather told her. He was a police officer and the most infamous case he was involved in was called the Torso Killer. In the early 1930s someone was killing people and then dismembering their bodies, cutting away the head and limbs leaving a torso, therefore the name Torso Killer.

Now Theresa is all grown up and has become a police officer herself.

She is a forensic scientist in Cleveland and carrying on the family tradition.

75 years has passed since the last victim of the Torso killer has been found. Then a mummified body is found in an abandoned warehouse. The victim appears to have been there many years and could be the last victim of the killer. When the victim is identified as James Miller, Theresa discovers that he was a police officer that was working the case of the Torso Killer and it appears he was getting too close to the identity of the brutal murder.

If that is not strange enough another body is discovered, this body a prostitute who was killed in the last 24 hours. However her body bears all the markings of the Torso Killer’s other victims. The Killer would be in his late 80s so this appears to be the work of a copycat that does not want his crimes or the crimes of the original killer solved and will go to any lengths to stop the police.

Theresa MacLean series

Takeover  [review 1] [review 2]
Evidence of Murder [review]
Trail of Blood, No 3[review]
Defensive Wounds, 4 [amazon]