Catch Me (Jay Fletcher Series #2)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Former FBI agent and computer hacker Jay Fletcher, known as the vigilante Ladykiller in Holt's previous novel, Watch Me, returns in this slick, grisly page-turner to play cat-and-mouse with an escaped serial killer she helped incarcerate. Jay is trying to master glassblowing and become comfortable with a new identity as a member of the Witness Security Program when she is contacted electronically by brilliant and vicious Billy Bones, a young murderer in the mold of Jeffrey Dahmer. (In Holt's first novel, Jay happened upon the Internet meeting-place of serial killers and rid the world of four of them, including the notorious Ricky Stiles, mentor of her present quarry, before turning herself in.) Billy, who believes himself the offspring of Charles Manson and cult member Mary Jane Shorter, escaped while being transported to a brain research program at the National Institute of Mental Health; he drops tantalizing clues regarding his imminent killing sprees via Internet messages to Jay. Once an anthropologist at New York's Museum of Natural History, Billy leaves a Heliconius specimen at each crime scene in a nod to "the butterfly effect" ("the flapping wings of a butterfly in one part of the world could eventually result in a hurricane in some other place at a later time")--an example of chaos theory, which drives Billy to produce what he calls a perfect death. As the mutilated bodies pile up, including those of children, both Billy and Jay reflect at interminable length on the killer's motivations, struggling to give a cerebral spin on what remains essentially butchery. "People like me are a different species entirely," Billy blithely tells one victim. "I kill people because it gives me a rush.... Because fear is just one big turn-on." It is also a turn-on for many fans of this genre, at which Holt is adept. Jay--haunted by having been raped when she was young--is an appealing character, though Holt's insistent use of italics for her stream-of-consciousness is annoying. Though this up-to-the-minute thriller feels overly manipulated, in the end it provides an abundance of old-fashioned fright. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The title isn't the only familiar note Holt strikes in bringing rogue FBI agent Jay Fletcher (Watch Me, 1995) up against another mean serial killer. After executing murder-master Ricky Stiles at the close of her blood-soaked debut, Jay's been eased out of the Bureau and into the Witness Protection Program. She thinks her life has settled down, except of course for her dreams of carnage and summary justice. But when Stiles protégé William Paris Bonisteel, a.k.a. Billy Bones, breaks out of his mental institution, Jay is the first person he gets in touch with, since his computer expertise makes it child's play for him to find out her new home and alias. And since the second person Billy taps is the head of the US Marshals' Fugitive Operations Division, warning that if Jay isn't put back on the job of tracking him, he'll go berserk (as if this isn't already a serious possibility), Jay's soon back in the saddle, the unofficial, unarmed partner of bearish Deputy Marshal Jack Dane. The two follow Billy's spectacularly grisly trail from New York to Massachusetts to the bayous of Louisiana, with a brief, tender time-out in Key West before the finale on a tiny island in Washington's Siren Bay—and the inevitable movie-inspired coda. Billy's improbable habit of leaving clues to his next move at every murder scene keeps up the suspense without a break. But since the rules of Billy's warped game stay the same, the stakes never rise, and the characters, despite their obsession with Hannibal Lecter, are just barely dimensional enough to keep the pot boiling, the repeated pattern—Jay and Jack puzzle out the clue the killer has left them, race to the next scene, and arrive toolate—gives an effect that can be monotonously thrilling too, as if Holt were writing a series of linked stories rather than a novel. As in the more cleverly constructed Watch Me, the target audience will nod and smile grimly at Jay's assessment: "She'd killed four men but she hadn't killed enough."