You can't read this meaty thriller without hearing the echoes of Hitchcock's "Vertigo," "Rear Window," "Rebecca," and even "Suspicion." And that's just fine, because Morrell is more than up to the task of filling such wide footsteps.

When we first meet Mitch Coltrane, prize-winning professional photographer, he's in Bosnia secretly documenting the grisly cover-up of ethnic cleansing massacres by one Dragan Ilkovic, a Himmler-style butcher quite enamored of his deadly efficiency. Unfortunately, Mitch is almost killed, barely escaping with his life. His work nets him a second Newsweek cover — and a mortal enemy, for Ilkovic has eluded his captors, and a roll of film dropped by Mitch has led the enemy home to LA, where Mitch and his girlfriend Jennifer, a magazine editor, are wholly unprepared for the carnage Ilkovic is willing to cause in the name of revenge.

In a tour-de-force first half that pits a resourceful Mitch against this trained killing machine-monster and takes from him almost everything and everyone he loves, Morrell proves his considerable skill at orchestrating a symphony of violence so brutal that it almost takes on a certain rugged beauty. There's something erotic in the ever-tightening death tango in which Mitch and Ilkovic engage, and there's a sense that Mitch the war photographer finds it somewhat fulfilling. Now the curve Morrell throws into this already heady brew is that since his return from Bosnia, Mitch has become disenchanted with his ghoulish (though breathtakingly powerful) work. When he berates his idol, aging reclusive legendary photographer Randall Packard, for the ugliness in his later work, he unintentionally begins a bond which will enmesh him in a decades-old mystery involving a lovely young film actress who went missing, and Packard's obsession with her image. Mitch cannot help but be drawn into this second tango, whose steps seem to overlap the other. 

To tell you more would be to spoil a superbly wrought novel of suspense in which past and present entwine, dragging into their vortex both the innocent and the guilty; and in the best Hitchcock tradition, separating the two is not as simple as it seems. David Morrell (Testament, The Totem, Desperate Measures, Extreme Denial) may be less known than his character Rambo (First Blood), but that's a huge shame because his thrillers are so intelligent that comparisons with the cartoonish movie Rambo simply break down and fail. A definite must-read for all Hitchcock fans.