If you die in your dream, do you really die?

Please allow me to introduce you to Jerome Carlton.  Jerome is an addict.  But his drug of choice isn’t meth or cocaine or even heroin.  It’s fear.  The fear in the eyes of a woman as she realizes she’s about to die.  And like all addicts, a fix can only hold Jerome for so long.

 

The novel The Nightmare Murders opens with the gruesome murder of a young woman in a sleepy Massachusetts town an hour north of Boston.  It is Jerome’s fourteenth such murder, but it’s the first-ever such incident for the little bedroom community—and for newly-appointed police chief, Jackie Hall.

 

As if her own insecurities about her “emergency promotion” to chief aren’t enough, Jackie must try to lead the investigation while dealing with the resentment of her male officers, false accusations from a fear-mongering female reporter, and the publicity-motivated road-blocking of an egocentric assistant DA.  And she must do it all without the help of her mentor—and father figure—Chief Roy Booker, whose shoes she is trying to fill as he clings to life in the hospital.

 

Complicating Jackie's life—and the investigation—further, are her former lover—a womanizing State Police officer with a shadowy link to the case, a young computer-forensics investigator with an unwelcome crush on her, and the killer’s former therapist who, herself, suffers from depression and paranoia.

 

But Jackie’s biggest problem is the latest victim’s mysterious and ruthless father.  A former CIA “interrogation specialist”, Benson McCray dedicates his considerable resources and unique talents to beating Jackie to his daughter’s killer—at any cost.