Home Killings

Zusatztext "In Detective Romilia Chac??n! Marcos M. Villatoro offers a fresh! unique! exotic! and spicy entr?©e to the potluck that is modern crime fiction. Villatoro is an author to watch." --C.J. Box! Anthony! Macavity! and Barry Award-winner "Twisty and clever in the extreme...will surprise even the most experienced detective-story reader." -- Hispanic Magazine "An excellently written procedural....A winner!" -- Library Journal Informationen zum Autor Marcos M. Villatoro is the author of several novels, 2 collections of poetry, and a memoir set in Guatemala. He holds the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair in Writing at Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles. He is a regular contributor to NPR and also hosts the L.A. program on Pacifica Radio called "Shelf Life," where he interviews other poets and novelists from around the world. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is at work on the third novel featuring Romilia Chacon. Klappentext The award-winning Home Killings , Marcos M. Villatoro's first Romilia Chacón novel, won dazzling acclaim for its fusion of character, suspense, and a gripping police procedural swirling around a fiery Latina detective. Now, in a new novel filled with the same remarkable precision and power, Romilia Chacón turns back to the reason she became a cop in the first place: to hunt for the sadist who took her sister's life-and has kept on killing ever since. He is known as the Whisperer for the cryptic messages he leaves at his horrific crime scenes. But Detective Romilia Chacón can hear him loud and clear. Still haunted by the death of her beloved sister, Romilia begins to dig into the case on her own time and soon finds help she doesn't want. A seductive international drug lord is obsessed with her and seems to know more about the case than anyone inside law enforcement. But neither an outlaw's unbridled power nor a cop's persistence can untangle the web of illusion surrounding the man they seek. For this killer is living at the center of his own brilliant hell-and he's already decided who will join him next....CHAPTER ONE My first thought that night: I hate gunshot wounds to the head. I leaned forward, placing my right foot ahead of the other and bending my right knee so as to hover over the dead man's face. This was uncomfortable. Still, I didn't use my gloved hands to balance myself against the red Honda sedan that stood two feet from the body. An old rule from academy days marched through the rear of my memory: "Always keep your hands behind your back when first approaching the crime scene." I didn't need to hear that. I knew it well enough. Still, the rule played along, reminding me that this was my first case in this new city that I barely called home. Better to hear recordings out of the rule book. Rules helped me distance myself from the killing, but not for very long. This exit wound, right through the top of the skull, an inside-out, crumbly, bloody cradle cap topped with disintegrated brain tissue, shortened the distance between the victim and me real quick. But the killing didn't let the pistol in the man's hand escape my sight, the first thing that was wrong with this picture. "Carajo," I muttered, "what a mess." "What's that you say?" the voice came from one side. It was a southern voice, one of the common twangs I heard throughout Nashville. I looked up at an older man. He crouched next to me. He was the medical examiner. His name escaped me. I hadn't worked any big case since arriving here from Atlanta four weeks earlier, and up to now had had no need to meet the examiner. The dead man's doughnut head promised to bring that old guy and me together for a while. "Oh. Nothing. Just a Spanish word," I chuckled, tossing my hair over my shoulder as if catching it on a hook. I sounded embarrassed. It wouldn't do to translate carajo to a stranger. Bad manners, m...

Product details

• Authors: Marcos Villatoro
• Publisher: Dell Publishing Inc.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 31.08.2004
• EAN: 9780440242109
• ISBN: 978-0-440-24210-9
• No. of pages: 368
• Dimensions: 114 mm x 178 mm x 13 mm