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 NOTE: Reviews are the opinions of the individual reviewers and not necessarily those of The Chiaroscuro as an entity unto itself.

by William D. Gagliani Email: tarkusp@execpc.com Raptor  by Dorsey Fiske  TOR $22.95  Occasionally a novel proves frustrating enough to warrant a mention - thus the dreaded mixed review.  Frustrating because it could have been so much more, RAPTOR nevertheless merits some notice for the things it does right.  You see, RAPTOR starts out pretty well with a First Person present tense point of view, that of a serial rapist in Wilmington, Delaware. The strong voice gives a realistically harrowing look inside the criminal's head, as he takes another victim late in the hot New England summer. It's safe to say that this strong and eerily descriptive voice is what kept me reading past the point I might have stopped. The rapist first uses a knife while assaulting Janet Davies in her own house, and only an unexpected interruption keeps him from murder. But the seed is planted and from that point on he thrills at the thought of using the knife in every attack. The knife begins talking to him.  The author is at her best when in the rapist's point of view, modeling his skewed thoughts and slowly divulging the origins of his seething, misplaced rage.  For me, the novel goes south with the protagonist, who's just a bit too good to be true. Kate Marbury is a Paris-trained painter and the police sketch artist. She has an adoring ex-husband, a successful playwright who wants to remarry her and bed her at every opportunity, when he's not buying her fancy dinners. Kate meets Janet when making a sketch of her assailant, and they become friends. So far, so good. I was even willing to accept that the police artist would be used to sketch the crime scene - though I've never heard of the practice (since police departments use photographers) - for the benefit of her "painter's eye." Kate becomes the rapist's victim, of course, and even that did not bother me unduly, for it would set up Kate's emergence as a vigilante of sorts, out for revenge. Or would it?  The police spend months apparently only making lists of the victims and their shopping habits, ignoring clues that should stare them in the face - such as the fact that many victims have their hair done at the same ritzy salon. Kate herself is a customer. When she is assaulted, Kate's eye for detail fails her when she cannot recall the rapist's one physical defect until a convenient point near the end of the narrative. Is that plausible? Her "eye" is the whole reason for the work she does! Kate's dialogue is unintentionally amusing, as she tosses about the likes of "My love!" and "I couldn't BEAR to think-" and even worse verbal flourishes, lines that no cop would be caught dead mouthing, even a sensitive painter cop. Even after the rapist has turned into a serial killer, and she herself has been raped, she continues to refer to him as "the little creep," "the little stinker," and "the little bastard." I wanted to shout: He's a serial killer - he's way past being a creep!  At one point Kate and her partner Jacko remind themselves: "he's a vicious killer now!" As if the dialogue weren't enough, there's poor Janet Davies, the first victim in the book. She becomes Kate's friend and surprises the rapist in the middle of Kate's assault - no problem there. But she's bringing pizza and the bow she just happens to be expert with, and a quiver of arrows, because Kate wanted to learn how to use it, even though it's already dark when she gets to Kate's rural house! So - you guessed it - Janet scares off the rapist by sending a couple arrows past his head (she could hit a bull's-eye, but her humanity keeps her from killing him ... I didn't buy that - if he'd raped me, I would let the bastard eat wood!). As if the huge coincidence of her arrival with an exotic weapon weren't enough, Janet disappears completely from the book, her role played out halfway through. Oh, and the rapist - whose point of view remains consistently interesting throughout - does not once wonder at the amazing  fact that he was chased away from one victim by another victim wielding a bow and arrow. Happens every day, I guess, in Wilmington.  Kate and her cops stumble through apparently nothing but list-making and occasional outbursts of impotent rage, ignoring their own sketches of the rapist and the connections between the many victims who are now being horribly butchered. Kate pouts after being taken off the case and sets up surveillance of her prime suspect, after finally remembering the detail she saw months before that would just about have solved the case if she'd mentioned it to anybody. Trapping the rapist in a victim's house, her shot "nicks" him in the ankle! Jacko's shot misses. No piles of wasted brass for these cops, even though the "creep" is armed and he's sliced and diced lovely old ladies and beautiful young girls (perhaps they are far enough from New York City to have missed the NYPD's disregard for wasted brass).  Okay, I was frustrated beyond belief by the portions of this novel which wanted to be a genteel New England "cozy" interspersed with the lurid descriptions of a wacko with a talking knife. This was two books joined together in sloppy surgery, and it made me consider with sadness how potentially great one was and how absolutely trite the other turned out to be. Marketed as a riveting thriller, RAPTOR could have fit the bill if it were as truthful with its portrayal of cops as it is with that of the rapist. And it once again proves that bad guys are more fun to write than good guys. I'd probably pass on this one if a serious procedural is what you're looking for.