Review: Waking Nightmare by Kylie Brant

FIRST HE LEARNS YOUR DARKEST FEARS...THEN HE MAKES YOU LIVE THEM.

With a serial rapist loose on the streets of Savannah, hotshot detective Ryne Robel needs all the help he can get for his task force. And he needs it now, before another woman falls victim. But Abbie Phillips isn't what he bargained for. Sent from an exclusive group of the best criminologists in the country, she's smart, fierce...and distracting. She may be a brilliant forensic profiler, but Ryne needs answers, not psychobabble and head games.

However, Abbie convinces him that head games are exactly what this elusive suspect is all about. The seemingly random acts of torture are actually calculated to match each victim's darkest fears. And the stakes are rising. While they study the devious psychopath, he's watching them - the next objects of his horrifying obsession.

Well, hello Kylie Brant! I think we'll be having a long and entertaining relationship :) In case you missed it, Jane recently reviewed the third book in The Mindhunters series, Waking the Dead, and very much enjoyed it. That gave me the incentive to go ahead and try out the first book, Waking Nightmare, and I have to say that I agree with Jane about pretty much everything. Ryne and Abbie were interesting to watch as they worked together on the case but fought their chemistry. The setting was descriptive and realistic and made me decide that I could never ever live in Georgia since I hate to sweat. I didn't pick the right person to be the villain this time so congrats to Ms. Brant for tricking me. What I found most surprising about this book was that while it was a bit formulaic - the sequence of events in this book is quite similar to Waking the Dead - the bad guy wasn't a murderer but a demented rapist who made sure his victims survived their attack. That was something I wasn't sure I had seen before. I was extremely disappointed to discover this morning that my local B&N didn't have a copy of book two, Waking Evil. I hate when that happens.