Help Line — Faye Sultan

When Tamara Meredith, a well-known psychic healer in Charlotte, North Carolina, is found stabbed to death and mutilated in her expensive uptown office, the whole city is obsessed with talk of the grisly details--everyone, that is, except for forensic psychologist Portia McTeague.

On leave from criminal work after testifying in a harrowing case of multiple murder, Portia is trying to concentrate on her private practice and volunteer counseling at the Help Line. But when the full-scale investigation team, at a loss for leads, makes a public appeal for help, Portia--oddly missing the very stresses from which she has purposely withdrawn--decides to volunteer her services and return to the media-filled, not to mention dangerous, life of forensic investigation.

When two more women in helping professions are murdered, Portia realizes that she's dealing with nothing less than a serial killer, someone with simultaneous needs to be caught and to outsmart the authorities. And as she tries to get inside his mind and determine his identity, she has no idea how close he may be or how cleverly he is manipulating her. In the end, before the killer is unmasked, Portia will be fighting for her life.

In Help Line, the authors follow their first Portia McTeague novel, Over the Line, with another engrossing psychological puzzle, and dramatize the emotionally and intellectually intense interaction between psychologist and client. It's a relationship that makes for gripping drama and page-turning suspense.