Fear Itself - Softcover

Jonathan Nasaw

3.92

1,102 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743231589 ISBN 13: 9780743231589

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2003

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A riveting psychological thriller from the author of THE GIRLS HE ADORED. Just as he's celebrating his last day on the job, FBI agent E L Pender receives a letter from Dorie Bell. Dorie is afraid. Eighteen months ago she attended a convention in Las Vegas for Persons with Specific Phobia Disorder. Since then, three of the delegates have died in suspicious circumstances. Carl Polander had acrophobia. Fear of heights. So what would he be doing on the 19th floor of the building the police say he jumped from? Mara Agajanian had haemophobia. Fear of blood. So how could she have cut her own wrists in the bathtub? Kimberly Rosen had pnigophobia. Fear of suffocation. She was fished out of a canal - but there was no water in her lungs. Dorie, who is a prosoponophobia, suffering from an irrational fear of masks, wants Pender to look into these cases. She suspects that someone who attended the convention is killing people with phobias. She's right. But she has no idea just how close to her the killer is...

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Review:

E.L. Pender, the FBI agent introduced in Nasaw's previous mystery (The Girls He Adored, is a few days short of retirement when he gets a letter from a California woman with an unlikely premise--that the deaths of three people who, like her, attended a conference for people suffering from a variety of phobias (some very strange indeed) were not the random accidents they appeared to be, but the work of a serial killer. Once Pender meets Dorie Bell, the letter writer, he believes her, and with the help of a gutsy agent sidelined from an active career in the FBI by her recently diagnosed MS, he tracks the murderer--the man who bankrolled the conference in order to meet his victims, learn their vulnerabilities, and use their fears to kill them. The sociopathic villain of this suspenseful novel is a sort of junior-grade Hannibal Lecter who gets his bloody comeuppance in the end; having written him out of the picture, and set Pender up for retirement, one wonders who the resourceful author will turn to for his next thriller. --Jane Adams

About the Author:

The author of the terrifying serial killer thriller, THE GIRLS HE ADORED, also featuring FBI agent E L Pender, Jonathan Nasaw lives in Pacific Grove, California.

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