cover image The Sound of a Scream

The Sound of a Scream

John Manning. Pinnacle, $7.99 mass market (352p) ISBN 978-0-7860-2763-7

At the start of this by-the-numbers serial killer thriller from Manning (All the Pretty Girls), 22-year-old orphan Daphne May, fresh out of a convent where she was raised by supportive nuns, arrives by train in Point Woebegone, Maine, to start her first real-world job. The plucky if naïve Daphne has accepted a position as governess to eight-year-old Christopher Witherspoon, without having met her employer, the boy’s father, or her charge. A handsome stranger gives Daphne a ride to the local inn, where she’s horrified to stumble on a waitress with her throat slashed in the ladies’ room. Might the clown she saw shortly before in the inn’s dining room be the culprit? Sure enough, Christopher’s late grandfather, she later learns, was a serial killer of children and dressed as a clown, suggesting a modern-day copycat. The ensuing bloodbath offers few scares and little suspense. (Mar.)