The Killing Hour

This is the fourth book in the FBI profiler series. I could not put this down. Such a great series!Mac is an agent with the GBI. He’s been hunting a killer for a few years without luck but the he is about to strike again. Two girls are abducted. One is killed and clues are left to find the other. Will Mac be able to solve the clues and find the girl in time?Kimberly Quincy is currently training to be an FBI agent. Her path crosses with Mac when she discovers a body linked to his case. She desperately wants to solve this crime and find the killer. Will she break the FBI rules in her determination to solve the case?

Hard to put down, although it got a bit draggy in some places. A very interesting psychological thriller. You don't know who did it till the very end.

"The Killing Hour," by Lisa Gardner, NY, Bantam, 2004 ISBN 0-553-58452-9 (pbk), 431 pg. This a chilling suspense novel entwining lives of FBI trainee Kimberly Quincy & Georgia Police Agent Michael McCormack -- each has a personal agenda but combine forces to aid solving multiple paired serial abductions & subsquent painful deaths of young girls whose bodies are later discovered in desolate Georgia & Virginia outback's. The murderer, dubbed "Eco-Killer", submits short cryptic 'Dear Editor' notes to local papers & kills the 1st of each victim pair but leaves clues to placement of the 2nd victims in remote locations where local flora, fauna & domain makes passage & escape treacherous. So yes, there's urgency in deciphering clues & locating the 2nd victim before her grisly death. Provocative use is made of many forensic specialists.We are inundated by Gardner's minutely detailed guesome & macabre autopsy findings, of abused both living & dead bodies by unsavory fauna of flies, maggots, crawling creatures, acids, mud & we experience insufferable heat felt by search party members & victims. We learn of survival & search/rescue techniques used to overcome hostile milieu that tests the strength & fragility of the human condition. A double whammy "Hitchcockian" ending is satisfying & muses "Why Do Murderers Murder?"The author's alternation of passages between murderer, his quarry & the "good guys" (Kimberly, Mac, et al) is sorta choppy like Huxley's "Point Counterpoint" -- & p. 145 commentary "...to find oxygen in air that was 90 percent water" over-reaches. But, Gardner's command of technical, romatic, & fictional facts made this an entrancing & chilling macabre read. I do recommend!

I have enjoyed this one, and looking forward to reading the next one very much. I am sure I will be starting it soon.

Interesting concept for killers like most her books. Definitely addictive! Onto the next!! Thanks again for another great book. Yay!

I would recommend this book to friends. At the beginning I got lost a few times,I would back track to get back in the store. Near the ending there was a small amount of reading that I chuckledat because it seemed to be hard to believe. All in all it kept me happily reading.

It a serial killer that uses heat waves as an excuse. I really enjoyed the continuation of this series with Kimberly as the focus.

I liked that I was able to get this book at such a great price. It arrived pretty fast too. My only complaint is that when I set the book down while open (writing facing down) half of the book pulled away from the binding and came loose from the other half. I glued it back in, but it's not going to be the easiest for the next person to read. I think this was a fluke though.

The overall premise of this book is good but I'm not sure that I'd read any more in the series. I'll explain why.First there is WAY too much detail - with various experts going into depths about sediments and leaf types and what have you. When a book is meant to be an action thriller then that kind of stuff just bogs it down and kills the suspense. From about the halfway point I started skipping pages on a regular basis. I also skipped through the pages relating to a victim who was trapped on a rock surrounding by mud. I think a few lines would've been enough to convey her despair, but it just went on a bit too much for me.Second there were times when the indication of which person was speaking was lost. If you have 2 people conversing and there are then a number of new lines started for the next bit of conversation you would expect the "speaker" to alternate. Except every now and then the line that should have been spoken by one person mentioned their own name. So the author had lost track of the pattern of the conversation. Couple of times this happened and I read and re-read it to try and figure out who'd said what.Third - at about the 88% mark there is a really confusing couple of pages. I won't say too much, so as not to spoil the plot, but Rainie made a phone call to warn Kimberley about someone. Kimberley went into the next room, where this person was, and then, a couple of lines later, this person and Rainie had a conversation. Where the heck did she spring from?But I think the thing that really stretched credibility for me was how much physical exertion and excessive heat the main characters managed to endure. I may be wrong (especially as I don't like heat) but it all seemed a little too superhuman. It's certainly not a BAD book. It just is slow in parts and Mac says HONEY way too much.So my preference would've been for less background description about all the locations and the clues - and a faster paced storyline. If you like serial killers and lots of CSI type information - then give it a go.

I am probably a bit late to the game with this author, however better late than never!This book came as recommendation (to start as a series as apparently the stories prior are not as good) and I can see why. It’s a tight, well planned and well structured thriller/crime story. It commences by following Kimberly through her FBI training programme where she is suddenly thrust into an unresolved serial killer case. Girls are being kidnapped in twos and the death of one has clues to the whereabouts of the other.It’s a great race against the clock, with often gritty nail biting scenes that twist and turn all the way through. There is also effective use of the perspective of the killer that is so often missed by authors of the genre. Overall clever writing that I haven’t come across since reading Nesbo and am glad to have more installments to stick my teeth into, solid four stars!

Good, solid Gardner here. A fast paced plot with a race against time to solve clues left by a kidnapper/killer to save a girl left in a remote, deadly wilderness. The killer baits the FBI by leaving a body, with cryptic clues on her to the second kidnapped girl, in the grounds of Quantico where Pierre Quincy's daughter, Kimberly, is a New Agent, in the middle of her training. Kimberly finds the body so feels honour bound to take leave of absence and find the second girl before time runs out. Add in a hunky southerner in the shape of Special Agent Mac McCormack, boiling hot, energy-sapping weather, bugs, snakes and a few interesting lessons on flora and fauna it kept me hooked, despite being a touch formulaic at times (in a good way.)

Lisa Gardiners many books of which I've read a few have always left me wanting more, and after a long break from her, I returned with the Killing Hour.This book for me didn't really grip me until a good third of the way through, and up till then I knew better than to throw the towel in early, as Lisa has in the past got me memorised in what may happen.The main characters of which there were a few all had a strong reason to pursue the killer, and go against FBI protocol, and the relationship between them grows as the book unfolds.Tina's story had me feeling desperate all the way though to be found, her mind process throughout her hardest hours trapped in that swamp felt as though that's what could happen to a determined person struggling to survive, and through the twists that are in place , I found my heart sink thinking the worst.A very enjoyable book with a totally different aspect of a serial killer, well worth a read

I'm a big fan of Lisa Gardner's Quincy/Rainie books but I'd missed this one until now.It's a good read, and you really root for some of the characters - especially the female ones, particularly Kimberly, Quincy's daughter, going through FBI boot camp, and Tina Krahn, the victim staked out to die - but the plot is too contrived for my taste. Gardner has clearly tried to come up with a variation on the serial killer theme, with the killer leaving all kinds of intentional clues as part of a lethal geographical game with his pursuers. It just didn't fully engage me, I'm afraid: I generally finish crime and thriller novels in a couple of sittings, but I found myself putting this one down more often than usual.You may like this one as much as some of the other reviewers, so don't let me deter you: just don't expect too much and you won't be disappointed!