Book Review: Watch Them Die

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

Watch Them Die     Amazon US PB Amazon Canada PB
Kevin O'Brien
Class/Genre:   Mystery
Pinnacle, May 2003, $6.99, 416 pp.

Rae Palmer knows she is being stalked, but no one believes her. When her boyfriend fell from a rooftop, the police ruled it an alcohol induced accident, but Rae knows better. The killer ultimately films his murdering her during a sexual encounter. He leaves the video of the snuffing in the return box of Seattle's Emerald City Video. Employee Hannah Doyle takes it home only to believe she has seen a real murder imitating a scene from the film Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

Hannah panics when she realizes that someone accessed her apartment after finding a copy of Rosemary's Baby in her VCR. Later she learns a customer, who was recently nasty towards her, fell from a window just like a scene in Rosemary's Baby. Hannah already worried that her abusive husband, whom she fled, will find her and their four-year-old son, wonders what to do. She believes that the killer plans to murder her and perhaps her son soon. She speculates that the killer is a student or professor both coming on to her in a film study class.

Though there is too much baggage hoisted by the heroine, readers without a shadow of a doubt will appreciate this taut serial killer thriller. Each prime player seems real from Hannah whose fears geometrically increased to the professor hitting on her to her fellow student and finally those working with her at the store. Readers never quite know who the killer is and why he fixated on Hannah until the end as Kevin O'Brien does what he does best keeping the suspense at unbelievably high levels.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner