Title:  The Body Reader
Series:
Author:  Anne Frasier
Genre:  Mystery Thriller
Published:  June 21, 2016
Publisher:  Thomas & Mercer
My Rating:  4 stars
Source:  NetGalley
Cover Description:

For three years, Detective Jude Fontaine was kept from the outside world. Held in an underground cell, her only contact was with her sadistic captor, and reading his face was her entire existence. Learning his every line, every movement, and every flicker of thought is what kept her alive.

After her experience with isolation and torture, she is left with a fierce desire for justice—and a heightened ability to interpret the body language of both the living and the dead. Despite colleagues’ doubts about her mental state, she resumes her role at Homicide. Her new partner, Detective Uriah Ashby, doesn’t trust her sanity, and he has a story of his own he’d rather keep hidden. But a killer is on the loose, murdering young women, so the detectives have no choice: they must work together to catch the madman before he strikes again. And no one knows madmen like Jude Fontaine.

Read on for my thoughts on The Body Reader.  No true spoilers, promise.

The cover description tells you pretty much everything you need to know going into The Body Reader.  And if you let your imagination take flight over the chilling words there in that description, you’d have every right to be terrified.

Jude had fought back and won.  It had taken three years of watching, learning every nuance of his face, eyes and body language.  But she’d learned.  No one was coming to rescue her, she’d accepted that.  Her only way out was through her own brain and it couldn’t be tied up in emotional reactions to the sight and sound deprivation, to the alone-ness, to the rapes… she had to understand this monster in order to defeat him or at lease escape him.  She was on her own and she learned.

It was hard fighting her way back onto the force, back to the Homicide division but she’d managed that as well.  Sure, her new partner thought she was certifiable but oh well.  He’d either learn to work with her or he’d leave, the choice was his and not hers to worry about.  If truth were to be told her partner was hiding his own secrets, again that hard won talent of reading people came in handy.  But right now there was a murderer out there, young women were being slaughtered and it’s up to Jude and Uriah to find this guy – before he strikes again.

The Body Reader is pure Mystery/Thriller.  There is little soft about this story.  Harsh, cold, unemotional – when you’ve lived through terror and the emotions did nothing to help you but your mind did, then you give up on emotions.  Jude is determined to discover why her.  What made her this madman’s perfect target.  Justice, yes.  Answers, she hoped.  Resolution – probably never happen.  If she cannot find those things for herself, perhaps she can find them for the murder victims.  After all, she’d trained herself well.

This story is a well driven decent into madness of a kind.  Is Jude still sane?  You’ll make your own decision, but she is changed forever.  The woman she is today will stop at nothing to get the bad guys.  Her personal life?  Either doesn’t exist any longer or is no longer important to her.

I believe The Body Reader proves that a victim may survive the crime – but they are forever changed by it.. and sometimes that in itself is the major crime.

*I received an e-ARC of The Body Reader from the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. That does not change what I think of this novel.*

Available in paperback, audio and for the Kindle