Watch Me

Author/Guide: James Carrol

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Ex-FBI Profiler Jefferson Winter is back

ISBN: 978-0571302765
Genre: Crime, Thriller

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What you need to know before your trail

Jefferson Winter used to be a FBI profiler in their famous BAU Unit, but now works freelance. He’s still as thirsty as he was in book one – determined to hunt out the truth. His work as a profiler is much sought after but his most distinguishing feature? His father is one of America’s most prolific serial killers.

The book opens as he is in Charleston,North Carolina finishing up one job and deciding whether to take his next one – in Hawaii or Louisiana.

Louisiana wins the day and soon he is on a plane to Eagle Creek to look into the case of a local lawyer whose death – he is horrifically burned alive – and it’s all filmed and put online. It’s Winter’s job to find those responsible but he’s against the clock…just thirteen and a half hours to track down the killer, before he strikes again.

Locations

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Travel Guide

Eagle Creek

Louisiana and particularly a small town such as Eagle Creek is the perfect place for keeping secrets – the atmosphere is one of a harsh exterior, remote locations, a winding river..and isolation in all its forms –

Shreveport and Monroe are the closest big cities. Nothing much happens in Eagle Creek so I doubt the media fools there could even find us on a map.’

True enough – and Winter arrives there his first impression of the town and state are just as revealing –

Every state claims to be unique, but some are more unique than others, and Louisiana was right up there in the top three. The state wears its differences like a bade of honour. For a start, it’s the only state divided into parishes rather than counties. Louisiana was formed from a mix of Spanish and French colonies, and the carve-up into parishes reflects those Roman Catholic roots.

The job of profiling the killer soon gets underway and to succeed, Winter knows that he has to really get to know the people of the town as well as how they tick. The town also seems to wear a hard protective shell that Winter as an outsider, finds hard to crack. The real Eagle Creek seems to be in East Texas and around thirty miles from Shreveport, Louisiana –

The town has a weekly paper – the Eagle Creek Courier, It’s pretty much a one-man show. Harry Spindler, the fellow who runs it, prefers drinking to writing.

Dayton Parish

Winter spends much of his time here during the investigation –

“The first thing that struck me about Dayton was the lack of swampland. Think of Louisiana and you think of swamps. Dayton was two hundred feet about sea level. New Orleans was six feet below”

Jasper Morgan a multi-billionaire has spared no money to ensure that the town and the people in it are save from the monster who has killed Sam Galloway. He appears to be hiding in plain sight making the search for his all the more perilous –

It had been ten years since the last murder happened in Dayton. In the last century there had only been twenty murders, an average of one every five years.

The one thing those murders had in common was that the victims were killed by someone they knew.

Sam Galloway’s murder was a whole new ball game.

Booktrailer Review

Susan: @thebooktrailer

This is certainly the side of Louisiana that you have never seen before – its one where death lurks in plain sight and where the FBI profiler, son of a serial killer starts his search for a monster. Not having read many books where a FBI profiler is the main character this was interesting but despite the race against time, it’s not so much the big thriller as the slow burning one which builds – however the ending was not the one I was hoping for – for reasons I obviously won’t go into here. All seen through the eyes of the profiler Winter yes, but for me the real star of the show was the setting and and the insight into the work of a profiler and not so much the character himself.