I DREAM OF MURDER

A deranged killer stalks two teenagers in this unvarnished thriller from Dexter (Alien Game, 1995, etc.). Out with his flaky friend, Avery, Jere gets a glimpse of a strange zoo employee, but it's enough to unlock a flood of fragmentary dreams and long-buried memories of an unsolved murder he witnessed ten years before. The tension mounts when the employee, Al Watkins, disappears; Jere finds evidence that the man is visiting the zoo at night, and Avery begins hearing odd noises in her building. Jere comes over to keep her company, and Watkins confronts them in the laundry room at gunpoint. Dexter's efforts to flesh out the action with subplots are only minor distractions. Shabby, threatening, always mumbling to himself, Watkins makes a thoroughly terrifying villain who will rivet readers—as will the shootout that ends the climactic standoff. Fans of Joan Lowery Nixon's suspense novels will relish this pulse-pounder. (Fiction. 10-12)