THE RED SCREAM

Now that homicidal drifter Louie Bronk's about to be executed for a murder he committed 11 years ago, Texas reporter Molly Cates, whose one claim to fame is her book on Louie, prepares her last article on the case. Oddly, her boss and powerful contractor Charlie McFarland, whose wife Tiny was the one victim habitual killer Louie will be executed for, pressure her to walk away from the story. But Molly won't walk away, especially after she starts to get a series of threatening notes aping Louie's prison poems; Charlie's second wife, Georgia, is killed (by a copycat?); and so is an important witness in Tiny's death shortly after Molly talks to him and senses he's hiding something. Then, four days before the execution, Louie recants his decade-old confession, claims he never killed Tiny, and demands that Molly help him prove it. When Molly, supported by her ex-husband, police lieutenant Grady Traynor, follows Louie's story about his telltale 1972 Ford Mustang to a Fort Worth junkyard, she walks into enough trouble to prove that somebody doesn't want the whole story to come out; but is that proof enough for the law-and-order governor? And if Louie didn't kill Tiny, then who did? One of the creepiest killers since Hannibal Lecter meets a plot and heroine worthy of Patricia Cornwell. Welcome to the big time, Mary Willis Walker (Zero at the Bone, 1991).