Belinda Bauer (The Shut Eye) opens The Beautiful Dead with a deeply disturbing scene of a murder about to commence--from the victim's point of view. Afterward, TV crime reporter Eve Singer arrives on the scene to cover the story, and the murderer contacts her. Soon she deduces he has killed before and will do so again, and he wants Eve to have the inside scoop. But even with the clues he provides, she and the cops are unable to stop his murder spree. Then the killer makes his cat-and-mouse game very personal for Eve, and the next murder in the news might be her own.
To read a Bauer thriller is to be hypnotized by her writing. Despite the macabre subject matter, Bauer pulls readers in with insightful portraits of her characters, dark humor and creative descriptions. A forensics officer "had all the calm detachment of a psychopath, but none of the comforting iron bars between her and the rest of the world." When a rival reporter is talking while eating California rolls, "Eve could see it in there--tumbling around like a white wash with added spinach socks."
Eve takes questionable actions sometimes, and because the serial killer story gives her a career boost, she struggles with the murderer's decree that "I need people to die in order to live--and so do you." But she is a sympathetic character, trying to balance work with caring for her beloved, dementia-afflicted father. Eve is a lonely woman surrounded by death who discovers how fiercely she wants to live. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd