Don't Talk to Strangers by Amanda Kyle Williams

Published by Bantam on July 1, 2014

A sheriff in rural Georgia hires Keye Street to consult regarding two abductions and murders of 13-year-old girls that occurred about ten years apart. Of course, the detectives and deputies who work for the sheriff resent her presence. Sadly, that's not the only plot thread in this novel that has been done before.

A surprising amount of the story is unoriginal. There is too little to distinguish this novel from the growing stacks of novels about detectives who search for serial killers. Amanda Kyle Williams sets up the usual array of innocent suspects in an effort to keep the reader from guessing the killer's identity. The killer is nevertheless all too easy to identify despite a final desperate attempt at misdirection. While the contrived ending is meant to shock the reader, I suspect most seasoned readers will roll their eyes and say "whatever."

As do many novels that feature profilers, Williams substitutes simplistic stereotypes of sex offenders for authentic character portrayals. The pop psychology analysis of serial killers that Keye provides -- emphasized here considerably more than in the first two novels -- is the familiar nonsense of fictional profilers. Her serial killer (like nearly every other fictional serial killer) can't resist taunting Keye by sending her messages. Another girl is abducted while Keye is on the case and it's a race against time as Keye tries to find the girl before she's killed. This has all been done so many times that, in the absence of a truly unexpected development, it became tiresome to read. The plot struck me as the work of a writer going through the motions who was unable to come up with anything new to write about.

Williams developed Keye Street as an engaging character in The Stranger You Seek. I liked the second novel in the series a bit less, but still enjoyed Keye's ongoing character development. In Don't Talk to Strangers, Williams abandons the complex character she created. The new Keye Street has become unbearably judgmental and self-righteous -- only she can solve the crime because only she really really really cares about the victims, and nobody else is working hard enough because they just don't care as much as she does. This is an unfortunate trend in modern police/detective novels and I'm sorry to see Williams succumb to it. I liked Keye better when she was too conscious of her own faults to be self-righteous. Of course, she's not quite so hard on the dreamy sheriff who wants to take her to bed. The "will she or won't she" story angle, like the rest of the plot, is predictable and unimaginative.

The supporting characters who helped make the first two books enjoyable are all but abandoned in this one. It seems as if Williams is also abandoning the sympathetic Keye Street she created in the first book in order to reposition Keye as yet another anger-consumed detective with profiling skills that border on the supernatural. Novels based on that character sketch are apparently successful so maybe Williams made the change to boost sales. In the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Williams talks about all the people who advised her so that she could finally "get it right." It that explains the decline of this series, Williams should trust her own instincts and stop listening to advisors who want her to write formula fiction. They are guiding a once-promising writer into a wasteland of mediocrity.

NOT RECOMMENDED