Alex Delillo

A detective faces a horrifying choice between love and duty in this hair-raising debut. Reminiscent of the best in today's suspense-from Jeffery Deaver's roller-coaster twists to James Patterson's cinematic pacing-Run the Risk introduces a blazing new talent in Scott Frost. As one of the writers behind Twin Peaks, he knows something about creating eerie and atmospheric tension. In this brilliant novel, he gives us a heroine who faces a challenge no one can ever be completely prepared for and a story as urgently and viscerally told as any in recent memory. Los Angeles homicide detective Alex Delillo works a case that chills her from the start: one with too much ambiguity and far too many surprises. None of the evidence-and yet all of it-seems relevant. A small-time shopkeeper is shot to death. Then a rare, untraceable explosive ignites in a bungalow, hurling the front door across the yard. Finally, a teenaged girl goes missing, her car window smashed, her keys still in the ignition. Even before they tell her, Detective Delillo knows that this girl is her daughter. Delillo tracks her quarry on a trail of escalating terror toward a fiery showdown that will test her wisdom, her will, and her every skill.

Seventeen years ago, three women were killed, their bodies dumped in the wasteland of the L.A. River. The serial killer was never found, and the case was mysteriously closed. Now, all these years later, Detective Alex Delillo reopens the River Killer case to help solve her own brother's murder.Alex never knew she had a brother until she went to identify his body. He was found next to the river near Griffith Park, a single gunshot wound in his head. LAPD is calling it suicide, but when Alex reconstructs her brother's final hours she stumbles across his research on an old LAPD case-the River Killings. The prime suspect was none other than their own father.As Alex gets closer to the truth, her father's past comes into focus, and alarming flashbacks from her childhood start to plague her. A journeyman actor who disappeared when she was a child, he had a history of violence against women, but was he capable of murder? Meanwhile, the schizophrenic son of the killer's third victim is out for his own revenge, and someone in the shadows is stalking Alex's every move and leaving a body count. In a chilling turn, Alex finds that the truth is as murky and as empty as the L.A. River itself. Replete with a labyrinth-like plot, feverish suspense, and the simmering setting that is Los Angeles, Frost proves he can rival the best popular suspense authors in this, his second outing in a promising new series that Publishers Weekly called "a jaw-dropper that will leave readers clamoring for more."