Stop Me [Paperback]

I'm sure you've seen them. The emails that flood your inbox that say forward this to 10 people or something bad will happen to you. Well when Leo Sharpe gets an email from a man calling himself The Vacation Killer he deletes it just like most people do. What Leo doesn't know is that this email is real. The killer has kidnapped a woman and if the email doesn't get forwarded back to him within 10 days the woman will be murdered and evidence proving the death is sent to the police.

But when Leo's wife disappears and the police receive an email from The Vacation Killer, Leo fears the worst. When 10 days pass and the police don't receive further evidence from the killer that Laura is dead, hope flares in him.
Leo's life spirals out of control and he spends months searching for Laura. He even goes so far as to befriend a man who confessed to Laura's murder even though he's never left his home state of Louisiana. Will Leo ever learn the truth behind Laura's disappearance or will he become The Vacation Killer's next victim?

Stop Me had me feeling like one big ball of nerves. The anticipation of who the real killer was and what would happen to Leo was mesmerizing and I just couldn't stop reading. The beginning of the book is a bit scattered but everything tightens up after the first third of the book and things really heat up with the last third. I highly recommend this one for anyone who loves thrillers.

Early on I was hoping for Simon Templar, or James Bond, or Dirty Harry to enter the scene, solve the crime, and bash the scull of the perpetrator. But Richard Jay Parker's STOP ME focuses on an "everyday" man who finds himself in the most awful situation of what must be the abduction of his wife by a known serial killer who to this point has shown merciless murderous intent on each of his victims. And even when it appears obvious to everyone else that Leo's wife Laura must have been murdered by this homicidal subhuman psychopath, one thing gives Leo hope: in the case of Laura, the psychopath, unlike in all of the other cases, failed to send the police her severed jawbone as a token of the completion of one more murderous bloody undertaking. The story then becomes Leo's relentless pursuit of the truth, a solving of the mystery of the Vacation Killer.

If you want to read tense crime drama combined with depiction of human travail, then you want to read STOP ME, a tightly constructed novel written by the hand of a professional! This book is worth every penny of its cost, and every minute of your time!

Stanley I. Brookoff (author of HYPERSPACE, the novel): Hyperspace

On Monday, November 12th, 2007, Leo Sharpe received an email.

Howdy doody.
On vacation in the uk
Slim, attractive brunette with capped teeth
Forward this email to ten friends
Each of those friends must forward it to ten friends
Maybe one of those friends of friends of friends will be one of my friends
If this email ends up in my inbox within a week I wont slit the bitchs throat
Can you afford not to send this on to ten friends?
Vk

Apparently messages like this had made the rounds of the US, Germany and now the UK. After being passed on by some and deleted by others, the results always seemed to be the same in that it apparently never makes its round back to the original sender. And to prove that he is as good as his word, a portion of each victim's jaw is sent to the police.

Leo received his message through his office computer. He was getting ready to meet his wife Laura to do some Christmas shopping so instead of forwarding it on to 10 friends he called the company's IT. They handled it by simply deleting the message.

Leo met Laura at their special place, Chevalier's Bar. Shortly after arriving, Laura told Leo she needed to go to the ladies room. She left and that was the last Leo saw of his wife. Then came his own email informing him that the Vacation Killer had Laura and would slit her throat unless he received his email back in his own inbox within a week. A week went by and unlike the other VK victims, no jaw bone was sent to the police. Leo could only hope that the email had made it back to the killer's inbox giving him hope that she was still alive and could be found.

Leo's search for his wife takes him to the United States where he meets with two men who both claim to be the Vacation Killer. But that can't be possible since neither had been to the UK. And since Laura wasn't the only victim in the UK area, it has to be someone else.

Leo's chase had me turning the pages to see who and what would lead him to the next possibility. I had my own list of suspects and as each was marked off my list I found myself running out of killers. Finding out who the real Vacation Killer turned out to be was a total surprise for me. I think it will be for you too.