Night Terrors

Psychotherapist Dan Rinaldi has his hands full in the third entry in this series (following Fever Dream, 2011). A confessed murderer in West Virginia tells police he'll lead them to the location of his victim's body only if Rinaldi comes along. Returning home to Pittsburgh, Rinaldi is literally abducted by a spectacularly arrogant FBI agent and delivered to his new patient, a retired FBI profiler whose decades of communing with deeply twisted minds have unhinged him. Palumbo, an award-winning Hollywood screenwriter turned psychotherapist, uses all his professional experience to craft short, action- and tensionfilled chapters and insightful sketches of people traumatized by violence. The pace accelerates when the stricken profiler escapes from the FBI's protection; the Feds believe he's on the hit list of a determined killer. Since Rinaldi can't do what he was abducted to do, he agrees to meet the West Virginia killer's mother, who convinces Rinaldi that her son couldn't have committed the murder he has confessed to committing. A twisty plot, lots of action, and a stalwart shrink make Night Terrors solid crime fare.-- Booklist <br> Pittsburgh clinical psychologist Daniel Rinaldi (Fever Dream, 2011, etc.) finds to his sorrow that even serial killers have fans. <br> Now that Wesley Currim has confessed to killing wealthy Wheeling coal-mine executive Edward Meachem and led Chief Avery Block and Detective Sgt. Harve Randall to the headless corpse, you'd think the case would be closed. But Wes' mother Maggie swears he's innocent and provides him with a cast-iron alibi he's determined to repudiate. Do Block and Randall have the right man in custody? Dr. Rinaldi, who went along with them since Wes had refused to talk unless he was called in, can't say. And he has no time to yield to Maggie's pleas and break Wes' confession because he's been snatched off the street by FBI agent Neal Alcott and plunged into a different nightmare. Even though John Jessup, convicted of k