Best Book of 2018 in Thriller/Suspense by Suspense Magazine Psychologist Dr. Daniel Rinaldi consults with the Pittsburgh Police. His specialty is treating victims of violent crime – those who’ve survived an armed robbery, kidnapping, or sexual assault, but whose traumatic experience still haunts them. Head Wounds picks up where Rinaldi’s investigation in Phantom Limb left off, turning the tables … Limb left off, turning the tables on him as he, himself, becomes the target of a vicious killer.
“Miles Davis saved my life.” With these words Rinaldi becomes a participant in a domestic drama that blows up right outside his front door, saved from a bullet to the brain by pure chance. In the chaos that follows, Rinaldi learns his bad-girl, wealthy neighbor has told her hair-triggered boyfriend Rinaldi is her lover. As things heat up, Rinaldi becomes a murder suspect.
But this is just the first act in this chilling, edge-of-your-seat thriller. As one savagery follows another, Rinaldi is forced to relive a terrible night that haunts him still. And to realize that now he – and those he loves – are being victimized by a brilliant killer still in the grip of delusion. Determined to destroy Rinaldi by systematically targeting those close to him – his patients, colleagues, and friends – computer genius Sebastian Maddox strives to cause as much psychological pain as possible, before finally orchestrating a bold, macabre death for his quarry.
How ironic. As Pittsburgh morphs from a blue-collar town to a tech giant, a psychopath deploys technology in a murderous way.
Enter two other figures from Rinaldi’s past: retired FBI profiler Lyle Barnes, once a patient who Rinaldi treated for night terrors; and Special Agent Gloria Reese, with whom he falls into a surprising, erotically charged affair. Warned by Maddox not to engage the authorities or else random innocents throughout the city will die, Rinaldi and these two unlikely allies engage in a terrifying cat-and-mouse game with an elusive killer who’ll stop at nothing in pursuit of what he imagines is revenge.
A true page-turner, Head Wounds is the electrifying fifth in a critically acclaimed series of thrillers by Dennis Palumbo. Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter, Dennis Palumbo is now a licensed psychotherapist in private practice.
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Another wonderful book from Dennis Palumbo. A thriller that will keep you up at night.
Almost twelve years prior to the story’s present, clinical psychologist Dr. Daniel Rinaldi and his wife Barbara were what appeared to be the victims of a mugging “by an armed thug in a hoodie,” an incident which left Barbara dead and Rinaldi severely wounded. He has been haunted by the incident ever since in a grotesque kind of irony, because as a consultant to the Pittsburgh Police Department (although not without his antagonists therein), he numbers among his clientele both civilian crime victims and crime-fighting professionals who have been traumatized by violent events. Complicating his life further is the dossier given to him by a dying man which suggests that Barbara’s death was not the result of a random mugging but a deliberate murder. The problem is, the assailant’s “face was almost totally obscured by the peaked hood and the black of night,” so his identity is unknown.
When HEAD WOUNDS opens, Rinaldi is still emotionally contending with episodes recounted in PHANTOM LIMB. While sipping Jack Daniels and listening to Miles Davis on his stereo system, when he’s nearly killed by a bullet that shatters the picture window of the front room of his house, the result of a domestic dispute between neighbors Eddie Burke and his wealthy girlfriend Joy Steadman, Rinaldi is ultimately drawn into a nightmarish cat-and-mouse contest that pits him against his late wife’s psychopathic killer.
Unlike its predecessors in the series, HEAD WOUNDS is not a whodunit, so it is not a spoiler to reveal that the novel’s cunning psychopathic villain is the extremely tech-savvy erotomaniac Sebastian Maddox, who could give Hannibal Lecter a run for his money when it comes to soulless savagery. In his zeal to torment and then eventually kill Rinaldi, Maddox goes after those who are close to the psychologist relationally and/or professionally, in the process putting the reader through the emotional ringer as well. I’ll refrain from going into details because I don’t want to diminish anyone’s page-turning excitement—of which there is a cornucopia.
The skillfully written and structured HEAD WOUNDS is strong on characterization and a sense of place, undoubtedly the result of the author’s background as a working psychotherapist and native Pittsburghian. A state-of-the-art thriller, it could function as a textbook about how to create and then intensify already high-tension situations in suspense fiction.
The fifth novel in a series well worth the time of readers who don’t object to realistic (i.e., strong) street language and on-page violence as well as some—but not overdone—on-page sexuality, Dennis Palumbo’s latest entry in the Daniel Rinaldi series is one of those gems about which I’d advise thriller fans to start only if they haven’t other things they absolutely must do, because they won’t want to put it down once they’ve read the first few pages.
In case you hadn’t already guessed, HEAD WOUNDS is unequivocally and enthusiastically recommended.
© 2018 Barry Ergang