Jonathan Nasaw - The Girls He Adored

Call him Max. But don't shake his hand. Don't get too close at all. Because Max isn't just Max. He's a lot of people, a twisted collection of personalities struggling to find a way out. One of those personalities is vicious, Insatiable. A man with a talent for the blade and a hunger for women with strawberry blond hair.

Max latest querry, Dr. Irene Cogan, is about to learn two things firsthand: what makes Max tick, and what happened to The Girls He Adored.

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Psychiatrist Dr. Irene Cogan is called to evaluate the mental state of a man who's got captured killing the young woman on his passenger seat in a routine traffic control. Nobody knows who he is or where he´d come from.
Soon she discovers that the man in front of her isn't just a man, he's at least six men and a child. There are Max, Christopher, Mose, Kinch, Ish, Peter and Lyssy hidden in one fast thinking and moving mind with such enormous amount of intelligence and skills.

While Dr. Cogan interviews the subject the doghoused FBI Special Agent E. L. Pender feels for the first time in over 10 years they finally might have captured a serial killer nicknamed as Casey. Casey's victims are strawberry blonds just like the disemboweled girl the unknown subject in jail killed.

High in the Cascade Mountains of southern Oregon a strawberry blond haired woman sits on her porch with a sewing basket full of separate reddish blond strands.

When "Casey" escapes from jail he knows Dr. Cogan might be able to help him control all his alters just a bit better and that her hair's just been colored frosty blond. There is a glimmer of reddish under the blond. He kidnaps her and begins his, and now her's as well, journey home.

Pender's fishing for clues. So far police and FBI have been able to follow Casey just because he left dead bodies every now and then but his final destination's hidden in the dark. When he finds Dr. Cogans taped interview sessions he finds the one clue that might be able to direct him in the right direction and the chase begins.

While I liked the strong beginning of the book very much, it got pretty plain and thin, somehow boring, around the middle. Reading Casey's story of how he'd become what he was wore me out, couldn't really grab me. In the end I wasn't surprised about the ending as it was more then predictable.
Nasaw did a very good job to explain what Dissociative Identity Disorder is but clearly failed to create a mystery.

Rating:
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Mass Market Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Pocket Star (February 1, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0671787454
ISBN-13: 978-0671787455