Keeper

More is decidedly less in Gustawsson’s overly busy second pairing of Behavioural Investigative Advisor Emily Roy and author Alexis Castells (after 2017’s Block 46). Emily, an expat Canadian who works with the British police, met Alexis during the writer’s research for a true crime book. Alexis’s romantic partner, a French police officer, was killed by suspect Richard Hemfield a decade earlier, and Hemfield was later convicted of abducting, mutilating, and murdering six women, leaving their corpses near Tower Hamlets in London. But while Hemfield remains incarcerated in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, the abduction of actress Julianna Bell suggests his innocence, a shocking development that reunites Emily and Alexis. Whoever kidnapped Julianna left a freezer bag behind containing her shoes, just as the Tower Hamlets killer did with his victims. Meanwhile, the mutilation murder of a woman in Sweden matches the Tower Hamlets killer’s m.o. Flashbacks make the story line needlessly convoluted and do nothing to make the ultimate reveal more plausible. It’s altogether underwhelming. (Nov.)