In Helen Fields's The Profiler, some of the cops with the Met police routinely rate crime scenes with a "gore score" in order to "warn officers what they were walking into," as one detective inspector puts it. The Profiler itself deserves a sky-high gore score, but not even its cascades of blood can erode this riveting thriller's hold on the intrepid-enough reader.
Midnight Jones is a data analyst at the UK office of global biotech company Necto, where employees use psychological profiling software to assess unidentified applicants' files for Necto clients. One day Midnight is unsettled by an applicant whose "brain activity showed arousal without empathy" when presented with deeply disturbing videos: slaughtered animals, a woman's death, and more. Midnight relays her concern to Necto's director of operations, who is dismissive: "You cannot report someone's psychology to the police." But shouldn't Midnight do so when a London woman is murdered using a methodology similar to one demonstrated in the videos? Might the videos have inspired the applicant to kill?
The Profiler is equal parts action and psychological thriller, its clutch of chapters from the killer's perspective manna for fans of inside-the-mind-of-a-sicko fiction. When Fields isn't laying bare the killer's haywire psychology, she's nimbly injecting her plot with reliable noir touches like split loyalties, betrayals, and unlikely heroes. The tough-as-nails but fitfully tearful Midnight is a smart and sympathetic protagonist whose hard choices are as unenviable as her one-of-a-kind first name, which does her no favors when the applicant comes prowling. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer