Savage Art
Danielle Girard's first novel,Savage Art, is a thriller with a  Jeffery Deaveresque twist. Casey McKinley was one of the FBI's most prolific  criminal profilers, until she herself fell victim to a serial killer nicknamed  Leonardo da Vinci for his horrifically precise scalpel work on still-living  victims. Casey survived the attack, deeply shocked and permanently disabled. Two  years later, she is a broken woman, having lost her family, her work, and all  but the most primitive use of her hands.Casey's problems have only just begun. Leonardo is obsessed with her and intent  upon finishing his job. But he has a roundabout way of proceeding: he  selectively murders little girls, ages 5 or 6, whose mothers look just like  Casey. This key bit of information is deduced by San Francisco Police Detective  Jordan Gray, who, like Casey, is obsessively devoted to catching the killer.  Even as Casey and Jordan make steady progress in locating Leonardo, his pace  increases rapidly, and Casey is in greater peril as those closest to her become  the killer's targets.Savage Artis a by-the-numbers thriller that delivers all the necessary  pieces but little more. Girard explores Casey's psychology in the first half of  the book, before the plot demands full narrative attention, and these moments  distinguish the novel from others of its kind. Leonardo and Jordan, by contrast,  lack anything that would mark them as different from the prototypical monstrous  killer and righteous cop. The occasional logical error mars the plot--Casey  should know the difference, for example, between a local power outage that  blacks out traffic signals and an outage that the killer has rigged to her  apartment. These aside, however,Savage Artratchets up the fear quotient  very effectively to keep readers glued to the book through the last page.--Kathi Inman Berens