The Stranger You Seek

Well, I have found my new detective obsession. I love good detective fiction and I love my handsome detectives, but I am an equal opportunity fan and Keye Street is my new best girl. The Stranger You Seek by Amanda Kyle Williams is a debut novel with great promise. The characters are terrific and the mystery is compelling — I put the book down half-way through to check Amazon and see if I could pre-order the next book. Sadly, I can’t, but I will be pestering her publisher for a review copy.

Keye Street is a terrific character. She’s a private detective with a sordid past, living in Atlanta, Georgia. She’s Chinese; she was adopted by the Streets when she was just a toddler. She didn’t come from a great background:

“I wasn’t show more emotionally devastated by the fact that they’d given me up. They did it because they were incapable of caring for a child. I mean, with the prostitution and stripping and drugs and all, they were really busy. I guess I was a little pissed that I’d grown up on cheese grits and gravy…but generally I have been incredibly blessed by their handing over their child.”

She’s also got a lot of baggage. She’s an alcoholic and her drinking destroyed her career at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. She’ll never officially work in law enforcement again, and with that background she does not make a compelling expert witness. Still, she has carved out a niche for herself in Atlanta, doing background checks, serving subpoenas, and chasing down bail jumpers. She does tend to gravitate to some odd work:

“I’d been a licensed Bail Recover Agent since leaving the Bureau. It bought the groceries while I built my private investigating business, and it still supplemented by income nicely. My shrink, Dr. Shetty, says it’s a power thing, that I have a brutal case of penis envy. What can I say? I like strapping on a big Glock now and then.”

In The Stranger You Seek, Keye gets caught up in the case of a serial killer. The killer is taunting police, writing letters to the media, and perhaps targeting those involved in the investigation. There are some real scares, some interesting twists, and a story you can really get wrapped up in. I was left with a few questions (Amanda, are you out there? I’ve got questions about Charlie!) but all in all this was a great read. show less

This book had me interested right from the prologue and even more so in the 1st chapter where the main character Keye Street narrates her introduction. Right off the bat her character is very unusual and "different." Her whole persona is about as contradictory as you can get...in a good, weirdy way...lol...and her origins are a mystery within itself. (Maybe learn more in a series?)
Keye was once an profiler with the FBI. She was dismissed from her position for "lack of focus" which translates drinking problem. Now sober and trying to reassemble some sort of life after losing her job and a divorce, she has a small investigative business in which she mostly tracks down bail jumpers.
Set in the middle of a stifling hot, humid Georgia show more summer, Keye's best friend Lt Rauser stops by and smacks down some grisly murder scene photos from victims of a possible serial killer on her desk and asks for her help. Speaking of Rauser, I loved the playful sparring and witty dialogue between him and Keye. Good chemistry.
Seemingly stumped, Rauser and Keye cannot seem to connect the dots on how or why the killer selects his prey. To top it off the killer starts sending them letters with clues on his next kill. He taunts them cat and mouse style. They are racing agaist the clock trying to figure out who the next victim will be before its too late!
The story really heats up when one of the "Wishbone" killer's next victims turns out to be one of Keye's bail jumpers.
Not quite midway this book really had me going. I had to stop reading, due to the unfortunate need for sleep..lol, but I found myself thinking about the story while at work, looking forward to getting back to it. The ending was very unexpected. A really good read and I would definitely read the next one in this series. show less

The backstory: The Stranger You Seek is the first novel in Amanda Kyle Williams' Keye Street series.

The basics: Set in Atlanta, The Stranger You Seek introduces Keye Street, a former behavioral analyst for the FBI and current private investigator. Street, an Asian-American adopted by a white couple (who later adopted a black boy, who turns out to be gay), witnessed the murders of her grandparents as a child. After years of being a functioning alcoholic, she's sober, divorced and trying to build her business. When a serial killer begins terrorizing Atlanta, her longtime friend (and head of homicide), Rauser, calls Keye in to consult.

My thoughts: If I have a quibble about first in a series mystery novels, it's that the main character is show more always far too close to the action. Here: it works. The Wishbone killer is savage brutal, and he's exactly the kind of person who would reach out to those working the case and amp up the fun and challenge. I also have a soft spot for novels set in Atlanta, a city I spent almost half my life in, and Williams nails the details and the spirit of the city (she lives there.) Atlanta's backdrop added a depth to the story I quite enjoyed, and it's one even those not familiar with the city will appreciate. Seeing these characters visit some of my favorite restaurants was a particularly special treat.

Beyond the pleasant setting, this novel is dark. The Wishbone killer is seriously demented, and I appreciated how Williams broke the tension with the more mundane aspects of Keye's work: bond enforcement and serving subpoenas. I always like characters working on multiple things at a time, as it adds a richness and dimension to them. I also really enjoyed the character development of Keye. She has a wicked sense of humor and her share of flaws, and this combination works beautifully. She's a complicated, likeable character, and she has the heft to carry a series.

Favorite passage: "I am less a part of the South than it is a part of me. It's a romantic notion, being overcome by geography."

The verdict: The Stranger You Seek is a smart, thrilling debut. The mystery was tightly plotted and Keye Street is a wonderfully complicated character I can't wait to read more about. In fact, now that I've finished this review, I'm sitting down to start the second book in the series, The Stranger in the Room. show less

Opening line: "The sun had not even burned dew off the grass under the live oaks, but the air was thick and soupy already, air you could swim around in, and it was dead-summer hot." Welcome to Atlanta, home of disgraced FBI profiler-turned-bail recovery agent/private detective Keye Street, recovering alcoholic, Chinese-born daughter of white Southern parents, and all-around smartass. Longtime friend Lieutenant Rauser, under pressure to apprehend the sadistic, taunting Wishbone Killer, asks for Keye's help as a profiler. Inevitably, she is forced back into contact with a hated former colleague, the "official" profiler on the case. Besides the obvious need to pull Keye into an investigation to provide plot, her foray back into profiling show more offers psychological insight. When Keye was a profiler, she also became an alcoholic and destroyed her marriage, so her involvement brings up a delicious stew of emotional and psychological reactions.

Atlanta and the South are fully formed and alive in THE STRANGER YOU SEEK. The atmosphere, the people, the contradictions, and the neighborhood descriptions make for a rich setting. I marked several passages (in addition to the opening line) that capture Atlanta perfectly. As is obligatory in serial killer novels, passages from the psychotic killer's point-of-view are included. These are usually my least favorite part of a thriller (yes, yes, your mommy never loved you and you're a total nutjob...we get it already), but Williams chooses a fresh approach that worked well for me. The pacing is excellent -- this is a stay-up-all-night thriller -- and the twists and developments kept me guessing. Williams has surrounded Keye with a group of quirky friends, colleagues, and family members that play off her personality in different ways.

Plot, pacing, and prose are all excellent, but what makes THE STRANGER YOU SEEK stand out from the average thriller is personality, which Keye has in abundance. She's brilliant, funny, and deeply flawed, but she knows those flaws well. An exchange between Keye and Rauser:

"He thinks he's a goddamned analyst now because he's in therapy. And he's so righteous. It's painful."
"And what was Dr. Dan's diagnosis?"
"That I can't be serious. That I have intimacy issues."
Rauser chuckled. "How'd you take it?"
I sighed. "I told him, 'I got your issues right here,' and I grabbed my crotch and walked out."

And, just like that, I have a new favorite series heroine. Lucky for all of us, this is the first novel in a series, with the second and third out in 2012 and 2013.

Source disclosure: I received an ARC of this book courtesy of Random House through Shelf Awareness. show less

Confession time (again!) I wasn't going to read this book. Nothing personal. I just looked at the blurb, saw serial killer and thought... over them. But, long story short, there was this homework assignment, I thought ... proof copy, grabbed the first one I saw, and no homework was done. Could not put THE STRANGER YOU SEEK down.

The thing that really grabbed me was the central character - Keye Street. She's got one of those voices that can really appeal to this reader. A recovering alcoholic with a failed marriage, and a partially acknowledged attraction to her best friend, mentor and cop Aaron Rauser she's a fabulously complicated character. One of her own greatest critics, Street's got a very chequered background - going from rising show more star FBI profiler with two university degrees and an enviable criminal profiling track record, to working for herself, making ends meet serving subpoenas, chasing down bail skippers and looking for missing cows.

Obviously there are going to be comparisons drawn with Grace Smith / Stephanie Plum and the like. Whilst there are elements that are just about identical - the job description alone is enough to get you thinking in that direction. Add a slightly madcap family; romantic tension; a hefty dose of personal lunacy and a rushing around investigation style and there is a point in the book where you do wonder about the similarities. For this reader, however, there are some marked differences. Some nuance about the humour, some of the self-awareness in the character, but probably the biggest difference is a real sense of desire to move on. The madcap family (sans Grandmother, but with a mother and father who fill in the personality requirements quite nicely), is built around the adoption, by her extremely Southern American sensibility parents, of Street (Asian American) and her brother (African American). Both the parents have starring roles in the humour department, which was subtle, and clever and frequently laugh out loud funny. Humour, in particular, is something that does not always travel well culturally, and for this Australian reader, much of the conflict between Street and her mother, and between her mother and father, worked really well - with a stand-out being the father's recitation of grace, which had me roaring with laughter.

The point of these books isn't just the humour. There's a serious investigation going on, although built around a serial killer, that has some hints and tips along the way that could make a reader wonder if there is something slightly different going on here.

Street also isn't just what you see is what you get. There's depth, roundedness, flaws and good points to her character that are very engaging. There's an acerbic, pointed and enlightening internal voice that works, not just to give you a chance to get to know the character, but also makes her quite real. Her supporting cast is relatively well fleshed out also, although, obviously as this is the first book, the concentration is pretty heftily on the main character. The serial killer thread is nicely done this time, with a final twist in the tail that I simply did not see coming.

That's not to say that everything is perfect and there are some rather hamfisted attempts at humour which don't quite hit the mark... not the least is a tendency to see sexual desire in every lesbian character that Street encounters, but all in all, thanks to THE STRANGER YOU SEEK, once again, "over serial killers" needs an equivocation clause..... show less

This part of the review is spoiler-free…I’ll warn you when it’s no longer safe.

At first, when I read the prologue, which is from the killer’s POV, I thought that I had another cookie-cutter type thriller on my hands. I mean, haven’t we had this enough? Then chapter one gives us a literal introduction by Keye of herself…she comes right out and says my name is Keye Street (which is an annoying name, really) and I can’t recall coming across this technique before and I liked it. Then in the next two pages Williams made me like Keye. Really, in 3 pages I liked her. Yeah the alcoholic thing is played, but despite that there is some originality in the character and it worked. I also liked how she kept some things dark about Keye, show more like her marriage to Dan; we have the broad strokes, but she’s saving the details for later. Good. I hate it when an author tries to give us every last particular of a person right off the bat (for a good example read – and borrow it for goodness sake – Gideon’s Sword by Preston & Child. Absolutely nothing left to savor over that guy; no mystery). Bor-ring.

In terms of how the story played out, I wished that we didn’t have the killer’s blog entries when we had them, since the investigatory team didn’t have them at the same time we did. It seemed out-of-sync with the real-time nature of the investigation since it was told in the first-person narrative. I think this type of device works better when included in a third-person narrative, like Sandford does with Davenport. Writing-wise the story is very fluid and natural; I caught a few clinker sentences that could have been done better, but not many.

I also appreciate that Williams seems to know her audience and I can’t tell you how much that makes a difference. No long-winded info-dumps about forensic protocols and evidence-gathering techniques. No step-by-step explanations about police procedure. No big back story about how different it is being private rather than a public detective. She knows we already read Sandford, Deaver, Reichs and Crais. She knows we watch Criminal Minds, Dexter and Law and Order. And you know what? I think she does, too. Nice.

Although the sub-surface romance was obvious, it was done with humor and a light touch, something I also appreciate. Overall the humor was black and often un-PC which I think is pretty brave these days and made the book more realistic and appealing to me. Also brave is to make a person so scornful of religion, in fact, Keye might be an atheist (gasp!). The supporting characters are a bit color-by-numbers, but hopefully Williams gives them more individuality as time goes on. I’m definitely going to seek out the next novel in the series even though it bugs me that every frigging author on earth has to be a series author.

Spoiler alert!

Williams did latch onto some standard memes of the genre though; red herring suspect being the first. I just knew Charlie couldn’t be the real killer. When things started coming to light about him I agreed that he did have something violent and probably criminal about him, but I also knew he was being set up. She made up for that by killing LaBrecque and leaving him for Keye to find. I didn’t expect that considering the other vignettes of her unconnected PI work and it did shock me. Hard to do to me and nice to be on the receiving end of. However, during the whole Brooks scenario, I smelled perfume in the air; I had a gut feeling it was a woman doing the killing. When Dobbs, the serial philanderer, went down I felt it even more. So when Keye and Williams started talking about her suspect without using personal pronouns, I knew it and Margaret was the only woman powerful enough in the story to be the killer. Eh, it wasn’t surprising and I wish she’d done more connecting the dots with Margaret; the pulling her out of a hat was a bit of a let-down considering the high-caliber novel she had going. Williams did blind-side me with Diane though and that was sad; she was just the office manager Keye needed.

I must admit to being relieved that Rauser woke up in the end. It was corny and I would have been ok with it being left up in the air until the next book, but it was a nice ending that left me feeling positive, which is not a bad thing. I am a bit bugged that Margaret gets away though; shades of Hannibal Lecter and Gretchen Lowell. Depending on how its handled in future, it could be a big PITA for a reader. I don't mind long story-arcs and plot points that don't wrap up in one book, but I don't like gimmicky stuff and it could go that way. Tension-creating fake-outs don't make me buy novels no matter how good the rest of it is. Oh and please don't make Keye a marriage-and-a-baby-woman. Please. show less

The Stranger You Seek was a book that caught my interest at page one and didn't let go until the very last page. Keye Street is a woman with many of her own demons, but she soon finds herself getting drawn deep into a murder investigation where the killer is taunting the police. Her past as a FBI profiler begins to come back to haunt her as she attempts to help with the ongoing investigation while unknowingly becoming one of the killer's targets. Of course, the question is if she can find the killer before he finds her.

I enjoyed each and every page of this book due to the underlying suspense that was constant throughout the book. From the very beginning, the author pulled me into the story with a creepy and horrifying murder that show more ratcheted up the suspense level right away. The novel continually kept me turning the pages as I tried to figure out who the killer could possibly be. I loved Keye Street as the main character for a variety of reasons but mainly because she was so scarred and troubled. The author did a great job of realistically portraying Keye's demons which made me want Keye to succeed all the more. I find that I love a good main character that has a few rough edges. That maybe isn't perfect but is working towards getting his or her life back on track. Keye was one of those main characters and I liked her all the more for it. I really appreciated that she wasn't apologetic for her darker past and I felt that the author did a good job of incorporating it into the novel.

The mystery itself was quite good. I didn't see the ending coming from a mile away. And I really liked that because I felt like the author wasn't afraid to pull any punches. I didn't expect that last page but I was presently surprised when it happened (those of you that have already read the book will understand). A good mystery will always suck me in and that is exactly what this book did. It had atmosphere in spades, solid characters with depth, and a killer ending! I couldn't ask for more. Except for there to be another book featuring Keye which apparently there is. How exciting!! I went into this book thinking it was a standalone to find out that it will be the beginning to a mystery series. I cannot wait to grab the second book and see what happens next! This was an awesome read that I highly recommend! And can I just say how much I love when I find a new author that I enjoy this much? So exciting (hence all of the exclamation points)!

Bottom Line: One of my favorite thrillers that I have read so far this year!

Disclosure: Checked out from my local library. I wish I had a bought a copy though because I will be recommending it a lot! show less