Red room

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Psychologist Kit Quinn is a young woman doing a dangerous job. She inhabits a world of gruesome crime scenes, tense interrogations and violent insanity. On returning to work after a brutal attack, she is asked by the police to advise them on an apparently simple murder inquiry. The body of a young woman has been found by a London canal. The prime suspect is the man who attacked and scarred Kit.

Despite the insistence of the police, Kit refuses to accept the obvious answer and finds other crimes, other victims. Her obsessive search for the link between the cases leads her into the world of young street-people - the missing, the unloved; those who try to save them and those who prey on them. Into the blood-dark heart of her own fears. Into the Red Room, and danger . . .

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Psychologist Grace Shilling, heroine of French's popular Beneath the Skin, is back. She's not looking for trouble in fact, she is overwhelmed by images of the dead women who as a police consultant she still was not able to save but then the police hand her a tough new case that is not what it appears to be. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Following two highly praised psychothrillers (Killing Me Softly and Beneath the Skin), this fiction noir will be welcomed by French's avid readers. However, the fragmented, wandering at times almost directionless narrative won't do much to add to French's (actually a husband-and-wife writing team) list of fans. Attractive young London forensic psychiatrist Kit Quinn is having a run of rotten luck. First she catches her lover with another woman, then she's maimed by Michael Doll, a disturbed young man the police were questioning for loitering near an elementary school. When Doll is arrested again, suspected of murdering a young woman whose body is found by a canal where he fishes, Kit is asked to do a psychological assessment. Uncertain about Doll's guilt, Kit points out that the cops have no case. A tenuous connection to Will Pavic, the director of the homeless shelter frequented by runaway teens in a seedy ghetto, leads nowhere. Over protests from the smug police that she is wasting her time, Kit, following her intuition, wanders far afield and questions the affluent family of a young mother, the victim of an earlier, seemingly unrelated kidnapping and murder. Also, she intuits a link with the suicide of a troubled teen. Ignoring her fear that he may be involved, Kit, out of loneliness, enters a bittersweet affair with Will. Despite a literary yard sale of gratuitous characters, superfluous subplots and prose that at times seems remote and abstract, the chimerical plot is rescued as the signature climax is delivered right on cue. Major ad/promo. (Aug. 7) FYI: MGM will release the film version of Killing Me Softly, starring Heather Graham and Joseph Fiennes, this October. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

French's skill at creating vivid characters and settings, combined with her ability to generate suspense, makes her books difficult to put down. Her latest, set in London, opens with the police asking psychiatrist Dr. Kit Quinn to consult on the murder of a troubled young girl called Lianne. In reality, what the coppers want is to close the case, and to do that, they need Kit to confirm that their suspect, Michael Doll, is a depraved killer. What they don't want is for Kit to raise serious doubts about Doll's guilt, which is exactly what she does. She further enrages the authorities by arguing that Lianne's murder is tied to that of Philippa, a prosperous young mother. Meanwhile, Kit's love life is a mess, as she struggles to avoid creepy admirer Doll and tries to bond with world-weary hostel director Will Pavic. Razor-sharp prose and precision plotting make this the latest in a string of hits for the talented French. --Jenny McLarin

Kirkus Book Review

Another strong, vulnerable, beset young heroine; another brilliant thriller from French (Beneath the Skin, 2000, etc.), who now has to be considered a major player. It's hard not to like pretty, well-meaning psychologist Dr. Kit Quinn, though some are certainly willing to give it a try. Detective Chief Inspector Oban, for instance, anoints her "the most bloody-minded woman" he's ever had to work with. That being said, however, he admires the quirky/dazzling quality of her insights. Which is why he asks for her help in the matter of Michael Dall, the no-account he'd like to nail for a bothersome unsolved murder. Hoping to augment flimsy circumstantial evidence, Oban wants Kit to profile Dall as dangerously unbalanced, a potential menace to society. He is that, Kit believes, but not the perp for this particular crime, inconvenient as that may be. Oban huffs and puffs but finally backs off, huffs and puffs some more when Kit's digging unearths additional inconvenient matter. Three murders previously regarded as separate and distinct might well be linked. If they are, then the police have a serial killer on their hands, with all the inevitable and unwelcome attention that implies. Increasingly captivated by Kit (in an avuncular sort of way), Oban gives her free rein, as impressed by her talent as he is dismayed by her unorthodoxy. Another reluctant admirer is distant, misanthropic Will Pavic, who runs a kind of halfway house for runaways and hates the world for its crimes against them. Despite himself, he's drawn to Kit. And she's drawn to Will, though there are times when she can't quite rule him out as the case-in-point serial killer. Not as unnerving as French's flawless Killing Me Softly (to be released as a movie in October) but stylish and engrossing nonetheless.