Fairmont High, San Fernando Valley, California, is now the
site of the worst high school shooting in history: 33 dead,
84 wounded; many of the 3000 students were in the gym
attending a cheerleading demonstration. The perpetrators
seem to have copied exactly what happened in Columbine,
down to the suspects found dead in the school library. It
appears the gunmen, seemingly two students, shot each other
after they committed the crime. The killers were masked
throughout the massacre but are found with their balaclavas
besides them, at a suspicious angle, but the camouflage
jackets they wore during the killing are missing from the
grisly scene.
In Marcia Clark's third Rachel Knight novel, THE
COMPETITION, Deputy District Attorney Knight and Detective
Bailey Weller are reunited to investigate the case. One of
the dead gunmen seems to have been positively identified,
but upon closer scrutiny, he might or might not have been
one of the shooters. It turns out that at least one of the
gunmen managed to make a run for it. Then Rachel gets
threatening letters saying there will be more mass murders;
it's now not only a question of finding the killers but of
stopping more tragedies from happening. Then Rachel
discovers a bug in her office; are the killers really high
school students? Upon the daunting task of questioning the
traumatised survivors, it appears some suspects might have
been unwitting participants in the tragedy, while others
cannot be as innocent as they seem.
THE COMPETITION is very complex and yet very easy to follow
thanks to Marcia Clark's crisp, precise, and elegant prose,
and the fascinating subject at hand. Numerous characters
are featured but we never lose track of anything; in fact,
it feels we are participating in the investigation. Ms.
Clarke writes of the painstaking, frustrating, and
sometimes extremely painful process of solving cases
dealing with the murder of young people. It's extremely
compelling, fast-paced, and positively horrifying, as it's
taken right from the headlines.
A word of advice: if you think you might need to take any
sort of break upon reaching chapter 78, the next to last
chapter, do it then, because you will not be able to do it
afterwards. THE COMPETITION by Marcia Clark is a blood-
curdling suspense, that shows the workings of the dark,
twisted minds and motivations of mass murders.
In Marcia Clark's most electrifying thriller yet, Los
Angeles District Attorney Rachel Knight investigates a
horrifying high school massacre.
A Columbine-style shooting at a high school in the San
Fernando Valley has left a community shaken to its core. Two
students are identified as the killers. Both are dead,
believed to have committed a mutual suicide.
In the aftermath of the shooting, LA Special Trials
prosecutor Rachel Knight teams up with her best girlfriend,
LAPD detective Bailey Keller. As Rachel and Bailey interview
students at the high school, they realize that the facts
don't add up. Could it be that the students suspected of
being the shooters are actually victims? And if so, does
that mean that the real killers are still on the loose?
A dramatic leap forward in Marcia Clark's highly acclaimed
Rachel Knight series, The Competition is an unforgettable
story that will stay with readers long after the last page
has been turned.
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