Cutter — Thomas Laird

He's a cutter. He accosts unsuspecting young women, he overwhelms them with a pad of ether. Then he kills them. And eviscerates the corpses. The crime scenes he leaves behind are not pretty. Nor is the talk, in this tough, tautly plotted, and tersely written crime novel that sets Jimmy Parisi of Chicago Homicide, a strictly no-nonsense kind of Italian cop, on the gruesome trail of an elusive but very efficient -- and alarmingly active -- killer. The bodies are beginning to pile up. Death in fact is reaping so ghastly a harvest in the city's parks and streets that the press and police are calling the merciless perpetrator "the Farmer." When Parisi and his partner, Doc, a homicide cop with an unlikely Ph.D. in English literature, begin to zero in on their quarry, the Farmer abruptly alters his modus operandi. Turning his murderous attention away from attractive, vital young women, he focuses his formidably perverse intelligence instead on investigating detective Jimmy Parisi himself. At a pulse-popping pace, through unexpected twists and surprising turns, from the scenic precincts along Lake Shore Drive to the perilous criminal underbelly of Chicago, Parisi and the Farmer follow the paths that bring them inexorably to a shocking confrontation. The suspense is riveting, and the outcome -- as explosive as it is unexpected -- will leave the reader gasping.