IM
Rick R. Reed
Published by Quest
Reviewed by Sarra Borne
“Instant Message or Instant Murder?”
The Internet is the new meat market for gay men. It’s
easy and anonymous to hop online, browse
a website and pick out a partner. So
what if the descriptions are misleading and the pictures are ten years
out of
date, as long as the sex is hard and hot?
Then a predator starts using Men4HookUpNow.com as his
hunting grounds. Chameleon-like he knows
how to seduce his prey by becoming any man’s fantasy.
They invite him over, let him in, and wish
they hadn’t when the blood starts flowing as he satisfies his own dark
and
depraved lust.
After the first killing, openly gay Chicago Police officer
Ed Comparetto is called in to investigate.
He is well aware the opportunity
is less about his skill as a detective and more because he’d publicly
outed
himself. Maybe his homosexuality could
somehow help him to figure out why a young man is dead, the victim of a
brutal
murder. Even after two years on the
force, it was difficult for Ed to remain composed when confronted by
the
bloodied corpse floating in its bathtub of gore. His mind busy
cataloging the
gruesome details, the missing fingers, the phone cord wrapped tightly
around
the corpse’s neck, the severed penis inserted into the victim’s rectum. Finally after taking in all that he still has
to interview Timothy Bright, the dead man’s best friend and the one who
reported the crime. What leads will
Timothy give him to help him catch the killer?
The following day Ed gets yet another early morning phone
call from his boss. This time it’s his
day off, and he’s being called into the supervisor’s office. Ed knows it’s going to be bad, but doesn’t
realize just how bad. He’s off the case,
but not just the case; he’s off the force.
Fired! For fabricating witness
statements! It seems that Timothy Bright doesn’t exist, or rather he
doesn’t
exist anymore. Timothy Bright has been
dead and buried for two years. Ed knows
he didn’t interview a ghost or fabricate anything, but he has to prove
it if he
wants his job back.
The hunt is on. Will
Ed figure out the truth in time? How
many more men will be savagely murdered before the killer is caught? Ed is on his own, the Chicago PD isn’t
interested in his “crazy theories.” It’s
a non-stop race to catch the killer before Ed loses everything, his
boyfriend,
his career, his life itself.
If you like page-turning psychological thrillers with clever
dialogue, you’ll probably like IM. An
intense read, not for the faint of heart.
Plenty of gory details to excite the most jaded aficionado. There are a few minor flaws, a few mistakes
that have been overlooked in the editing, and the ending was a touch
anticlimactic, but otherwise it’s one hell of a ride.
In their October 2006 issue, Unzipped magazine said about
Rick R. Reed: “You could call him the Stephen King of gay horror.” Rick R. Reed is also the author of the novels
Obsessed, Penance, and In the Blood. Most recently his short story
collection,
Twisted: Tales of Obsession and Terror was published in 2006.