Jack Flynn is a newspaper reporter who wakes up one morning
to find his world turned upside down. On this particular
day, he's to marry Maggie Kane in a civil ceremony and
leave for his Hawaiian honeymoon. However, he's besieged
with second thoughts and tries to find a way to cancel the
wedding plans.
Instead, fate intervenes and Maggie backs out on him at the
last minute. Then the Boston Strangler, who was supposedly
killed in prison, commits a new murder after a decades-long
hiatus and picks Jack to correspond with regarding his
crimes. Needless to say, Jack's wedding day did not turn
out as planned.
Jack's life continues to unravel as someone tries to kill
him, more women are found dead and more correspondence from
the killer is sent to him. Navigating newspaper politics, a
police force with its own secrets, and a city on verge of
panic makes STRANGLED a bona fide page-turner.
Brian McGrory tells the tale at a quick pace in a
down-to-earth tone that allows the reader to be thoroughly
entertained and not have to do much work to take it all in.
His words roll off the page in a logical and easy-to-digest
way that makes this crime drama a thrill to read. McGrory
clearly knows his craft.
Deadly and deep-seated political conspiracies are nothing
new to Jack Flynn, the popular lead reporter of the Boston
Record. But in Strangled, he finds himself in the middle of
a case that everyone thought had closed forty years ago --
the Boston Strangler. From the summer of 1962 to the winter
of 1964, eleven women were strangled to death in their
homes. The city had been panic-stricken. Dog pounds were
cleaned out. Locksmiths worked twenty-hour days. The
streets emptied after dark. Single women set up phone trees
to check on each other's safety. Then, a year after the
eleventh murder, the city breathed a heavy sigh of relief
when convicted sex offender Albert DeSalvo confessed to the
killings. Eight years later, he was stabbed to death in
prison, forever ridding the world of the man who had
terrorized a city. Or so everyone thought.
Boston, present-day. A series of murders has occurred in
which all the victims, all female, have been strangled and
left with markers eerily reminiscent of those once left by
the "Phantom Fiend" -- garish bows tied around their necks
and their bodies ghoulishly positioned to greet
investigators as they entered the crime scene.
In typical fashion, the police and local politicians have
turned on their publicity machine full-throttle in an
attempt to cool any rumors about the possible return of the
Strangler. Little do they know that Flynn is receiving
letters from the killer himself, thrusting the newsman
between the threats of a madman and several secretive,
uncooperative officials, who are tied to the original case.
With the lives of innocent women on the line, he must use
his keen journalistic skills to determine whether or not
this is a copycat on the loose, or if Albert DeSalvo was,
in fact, not quite the fiend everyone so easily believed
him to be. Is it possible that the Boston Strangler was
never captured and that he's been lurking in the shadows,
waiting to kill again?
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