A troubled homicide cop chases a killer with an artistic sensibility
Marketing executive Peter Barrows spends his nights scouring Greenwich Village for wannabe models. He lures them back to his studio with promises of stardom, getting their hopes up just before he snaps their necks. Then his work begins, arranging their corpses to be photographed, giving them the grace and poise they never possessed in life. Peter Barrows is an artist—and death is his medium.
A hard-bitten cop with a secret in his past, Ben Tolliver is obsessed with the Greenwich Village murders. After the third girl is found, he throws himself wholeheartedly into the search for the killer with the camera. Barrows believes that an artist must be willing to sacrifice anything for his work—and as Tolliver is about to find, bringing a crazed killer to justice demands nothing less.
James Neal Harvey spent fifteen years in the advertising business before selling his company and devoting himself to writing. He made his hardcover debut in 1990 with By Reason of Insanity, which introduced NYPD detective Ben Tolliver.
Harvey followed Tolliver through four more novels, including Painted Ladies, Mental Case, and the concluding thriller, Dead Game. In 2011, Harvey published the nonfiction Sharks of the Air, a detailed history of the development of the first jet fighter, and in 2014, he returned to thrillers with The Big Hit, a mystery about an assassin.