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Product Description
Review
"Robert Petkoff masterfully portrays intelligence officer Ryan Evans's personality change after he experiences torture in the Middle East. Petkoff's versatile vocal skills deliver a compelling plot that is classic Dekker. In particular, Petkoff's depiction of the insane workings of the serial killer's mind is riveting." (AudioFile Magazine on BoneMan's Daughters )
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
Book Description
FBI Special agent Brad Raines is facing his toughest case yet. A Denver serial killer has killed four beautiful young women, leaving a bridal veil at each crime scene, and he's picking up his pace. Unable to crack the case, Raines appeals for help from a most unusual source: residents of the Center for Wellness and Intelligence, a private psychiatric institution for mentally ill individuals whose are extraordinarily gifted.
It's there that he meets Paradise, a young woman who witnessed her father murder her family and barely escaped his hand. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Paradise may also have an extrasensory gift: the ability to experience the final moments of a person's life when she touches the dead body.
In a desperate attempt to find the killer, Raines enlists Paradise's help. In an effort to win her trust, he befriends this strange young woman and begins to see in her qualities that most 'sane people' sorely lack. Gradually, he starts to question whether sanity resides outside the hospital walls...or inside.
As the Bride Collector picks up the pace-and volume-of his gruesome crucifixions, the case becomes even more personal to Raines when his friend and colleague, a beautiful young forensic psychologist, becomes the Bride Collector's next target.
The FBI believes that the killer plans to murder seven women. Can Paradise help before it's too late?
It's there that he meets Paradise, a young woman who witnessed her father murder her family and barely escaped his hand. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Paradise may also have an extrasensory gift: the ability to experience the final moments of a person's life when she touches the dead body.
In a desperate attempt to find the killer, Raines enlists Paradise's help. In an effort to win her trust, he befriends this strange young woman and begins to see in her qualities that most 'sane people' sorely lack. Gradually, he starts to question whether sanity resides outside the hospital walls...or inside.
As the Bride Collector picks up the pace-and volume-of his gruesome crucifixions, the case becomes even more personal to Raines when his friend and colleague, a beautiful young forensic psychologist, becomes the Bride Collector's next target.
The FBI believes that the killer plans to murder seven women. Can Paradise help before it's too late?
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heart-Pounding, Page-Turning Thriller,
By
This review is from: The Bride Collector (Hardcover)
Reason for Reading: I loved my first Dekker book, The Boneman's Daughters, and *had* to read this.FBI special agent Brad Raines is called onto a case where women have been found posed and glued to the wall of abandoned barns, wearing a bridal veil and having the blood drained from them. The serial killer has been nicknamed The Bride Collector and things get personal when Raines finds a note taped to living room window of his high rise apartment. Raines' investigation takes him to an upscale rural psychiatric hospital that only treats those with high intelligence. It is here he meets Paradise a young woman who barely escaped from her father's murder of her family. Though a diagnosed schizophrenic Paradise has a talent that Brad is willing to enlist, when Paradise touches a dead body she sees the ghostly images of the deceased's last sights and sounds. This was a thrilling, incredibly fast page-turning read for me. I had each page poised for turning at just the right moment so there would be no interruption in the flow of my reading. I loved this book. Two things in particular really grabbed me: one being the serial killer aspect, the other being the psychiatric angle. I have a special fascination for books that take place in psychiatric wards, hospitals or asylums and this aspect of the book was very well done. The patients were carefully chosen to suit this upscale hospital and were treated to learn how to focus on and express their intellectual or artistic "talents" with a minimum of medications. Whether there is any veracity to this method, does not really interest me to dig any deeper. I am deeply interested in exploring the high functioning intelligence of persons with mental disorders and I really enjoyed the motley crew of characters Dekker presented with various extreme disorders and while giving each full respect. Brad Raines is an intense, likable, fully developed main character who carries his own dark psychological pain. Often in stand-alone thriller/mysteries characterization is thrown out the window in favour of plot but Dekker manages both equally well. Brad has a complete back story and range of emotions. He is a character the reader can relate to and feel for from the beginning. The plot is top-notch thriller entertainment. A gruesome serial killer, driven by religious delusions is pure evil. The third person narrative switches back and forth from the investigation to the killer, making the identity of the killer known to the reader from the beginning and putting the emphasis on the detecting and the motives. There are many twists and shocks along the way, including a main character becoming a victim to the serial killer. Differently from The Boneman's Daughter, this book does contain quite a bit of Christian material. The killer is delusional and rants about his God given reason for the killings and at one point Brad uses this against the killer by theologically answering each of his statements. It becomes heady stuff, which I quite enjoyed but may not be to everyone's tastes. Dekker certainly does have a taste for the macabre when it comes to serial killers as evidenced by The Bride Collector and his previous book. I really enjoy that he hasn't fallen into the series trap yet and hope he brings us another standalone for his next thriller, which I anxiously await. In the meantime I have some of his more mainstream Christian Fiction to read.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another Great Read from Ted Dekker!,
By
This review is from: The Bride Collector (Hardcover)
This was a very fast paced thriller with wonderfully developed characters and a plot with a serial killer that keeps you riveted to the end! This book would make a super movie! Seriously, you will not be able to put this book down! I read it in about two days, and loved every page! I do not like to give too much of an actual synopsis so I do not spoil the book, but seriously this was a great book.Though Dekker takes on pretty gruesome storylines in many of his books, I am very impressed that he always turns the reader back to a "God message" In this book, you will meet a number of characters with mental illnesses, and though very different people, they still deserve to be loved, just as God loves us! What a powerful message! I highly recommend this book and give it a huge thumbs it! It is due to be released April 15, 2010!
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (214 customer reviews) 30 of 33 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Scary!,
By P. B. Sharp - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Bride Collector (Hardcover)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
Taut and well written, this is a suspenseful psychological novel. A serial killer in Denver captures beautiful women and impales them by gluing them to a wall, one woman in each of seven different sordid locations, each woman dressed in a bridal veil. Of course they are all beautiful and they are all young. The killer leaves no DNA, no fingerprints, no tire tracks, nothing that investigators can use to discover his identity. But we the readers find out who he is early in the novel, a brilliant, supremely confident schizophrenic, gloating at his success and thumbing his nose at the authorities who can't catch him.Special Investigator Brad Raines of the FBI thinks the killer is in love with his victims, creating a supreme sacrifice, an offering to the gods, of sorts, a macabre expression of love. But the deaths fuel the killer to continue his rampage, like a vampire feasting off the blood of his hapless prey. But it takes a psychotic to know one and off the investigators go to an institution for the insane, but an institution limited only to insane persons of high intelligence, (Remember Hannibal Lecter?) The institution is filled with zany characters but the most notable is Paradise, a young woman who had suffered severe emotional trauma and who is reported to be able to touch a murdered person and name the killer by picking up some sort of vibes via osmosis. She hears voices and sees ghosts but nevertheless, you kind of get the feeling the real crazy people and killers are not in the institution, they are outside it and among us. Brad has a premonition. He wants Paradise to view body number five, Melissa. But Paradise won't leave the asylum, she is afraid of the outside world. So the mountain must go to Muhammad. The body is taken to Paradise at the asylum. On the gurney the sheet is pulled back revealing the dead girl's face. And Paradise, trembling, touches the cold cheek. And then... and then.... I'm not going to tell you anything more because I don't want to inject any spoilers; it's almost impossible to discuss the plot without giving something away. Suffice it to say I was scared to go to bed! P.S. I am adding this postscript a couple of days after I posted the original review. The reason is, I've thought a great deal about the character "Paradise Founder." Why she is named Paradise is explained in the book. But her first and last names together are an allusion to a question asked of epic poet John Milton: "Thou hast said much of paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of paradise found?" The killer in the novel mentions Milton's "Paradise Lost" in one of the cryptic messages he leaves at the murder scenes. Paradise Founder is quite an appropriate name. Anyway, this strange little girl upstages hero Brad Raines. 14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A psychological thriller that I enjoyed...,
By Thomas Duff "Duffbert" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Bride Collector (Hardcover)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
As part of the Amazon Vine review program, I recently selected the book The Bride Collector by Ted Dekker as one of my review items. I've not had the opportunity to read any of Dekker's works before, and the psychological thriller sounded like a decent way to spend a few evenings. Overall, the book was enjoyable. I'd have liked it to be a bit tighter in places where the action seemed to drag, but there were definitely enough characters to keep my interest.Brad Raines is an FBI special agent who tends to end up with very complex and gruesome murder cases. In this instance, he's responsible for someone who is abducting women, gluing their naked bodies to the wall, placing a wedding veil on their heads, and letting them bleed out through two holes drilled in their heels. Definitely not your run-of-the-mill murderer... The killer's pace is accelerating, and he's not leaving anything behind in the way of forensic evidence that can be used to track him down. It's only once he starts leaving notes behind for Raines that there's any sort of trail to follow. And the trail is quite warped. He is presenting these women to God, and is working up to his perfect offering. In desperation, Raines turns to a patient who is living in an institution for the mentally ill. She is supposedly able to touch a body and see the event that killed the person. Raines isn't all that open to the possibility, but he has little else to go on. And when events start getting extremely personal and close to home, Raines is forced to confront his own demons along with those of others in order to stop the killer and save the ones he loves. The way the story is structured, you know who the murderer is right off. The story bounces back and forth between the killer and Raines, so the payoff isn't the "who dun it" resolution at the end. Instead, it's more along the lines of seeing whether Raines will be able to stop him before he can claim his final victim. Dekker also touches on issues such as the mentally ill, spirituality, abuse, and a few other themes that will allow the reader to ponder such topics if they so choose. In the middle of the story, things slow down a bit, and it seems as if we're just killing time before the end game comes into play. I also felt as if some of the characters, especially Nikki Holden, were less developed than I would have expected. It may be that this isn't the first novel with the Raines character, in which case I could understand it. But I still felt as if I was missing something in terms of the depth of some of the people... I'd have no problems heading over to the library and starting to catch up on some prior Dekker novels. The Bride Collector was worth reading, and if his other novels are as good as this one, I'd enjoy them. Disclosure: Obtained From: Amazon Vine Review Program Payment: Free 6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
An engaging murder mystery,
By a - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Bride Collector (Hardcover)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
While obviously a murder mystery--even if one were to solely judge a book by its cover--I was surprised to find that Dekker takes the reader on a journey seldom visited in novels, and certainly not in real life, at least by most people. Dekker can be extremely descriptive, so be prepared for minute details, plus the point of view jumps from character to character, allowing deeper insight into each character without ever knowing the entire story. These are observations, not criticisms, because I really enjoyed this novel. I was further surprised when the murderer was revealed early on, and I often asked myself what more the author could possibly write, and yet I was never disappointed until I neared the end and felt he could, well, continue writing more. It was definitely a page-turner as others have described, and like many, I hated to put down (but you have to sleep sometime, right?).
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