Throwback Thursday: Dead Connection by Alafaire Burke

Author: Alafair Burke
First published in 2007 by Henry, Holt & Co.

When two young women are murdered on the streets of New York, exactly one year apart, Detective Ellie Hatcher is called up for a special assignment on the homicide task force. The killer has left behind a clue connecting the two cases to First Date, a popular online dating service, and Flann McIlroy, an eccentric, publicity-seeking homicide detective, is convinced that only Ellie can help him pursue his terrifying theory: someone is using the lure of the Internet and the promise of love to launch a killing spree against the women of New York City. 

 

To catch the killer, Ellie must enter a high-tech world of stolen identities where no one is who they appear to be. And for her, the investigation quickly becomes personal: she fits the profile of the victims, and she knows firsthand what pursuing a sociopath can do to a cop--back home in Wichita, Kansas, her father lost his life trying to catch a notorious serial murderer. 

 

When the First Date killer begins to mimic the monster who destroyed her father, Ellie knows the game has become personal for him, too. Both hunter and prey, she must find the killer before he claims his next victim--who could very well be her.

I have read and really enjoyed the last two books in this series.  I finally got around to going back to the beginning to see how Ellie got started.  In Dead Connection, Ellie is a rookie detective who is temporarily transferred to a homicide division to work on a potential serial killer case.  She goes undercover on an online dating site to try to catch the killer.

I really enjoyed this mystery.  I thought the whole story was well planned out with a big twist in the end. I really wasn't expecting the reveal in the end.  I like Ellie's character a lot.  Even in her rookie years, she still had the same determination and smarts that I found in her in her later books. It was nice to see she stayed consistent.

My only complaint with this throwback was not in the story itself, but in the audiobook.  The story is told form a female point of view (Ellie's) yet the narrator was a male.  That was just odd to me especially since he didn't have a great female voice when Ellie was speaking.  Not a big deal, but it still got to me a bit.

The next book in the series is Angel's Tip, so keep an eye out for it here.