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.