Damaged

Damaged by Alex Kava
Thriller
2010 Doubleday
Finished 6/1/10
Rating: 3.5/5 (Good)
ARC - Due out on July 13, 2010
FTC Disclosure: Received ARC from a friend



Product Description

On Pensacola Beach, the Coast Guard prepares for a Category 5 hurricane that has entered the Gulf of Mexico. When the air crew patrols the waterways, they spot a huge fishing cooler about a mile offshore. Drug traffickers have been known to dump coolers with smuggled product to avoid detection and pay fishermen to retrieve them. But when the crew open this cooler, they’re shocked by what they find: body parts tightly wrapped in plastic.

Though she is putting herself in the projected path of the hurricane, Special Agent Maggie O’Dell is sent to investigate. Eventually, she’s able to trace the torso in the cooler back to a man who mysteriously disappeared weeks earlier after a hurricane hit Port St. Lucie, Florida. Only Port St. Lucie is on the Atlantic side. How did his body end up six hundred miles away in the Gulf of Mexico?

Cliffhanger chapters, behind-the-scenes forensic details, colorful characters, and satisfying twists have become the trademarks of Kava’s psychological thrillers. In Damaged, she ratchets up the suspense a notch by sending Maggie into the eye of an impending monster hurricane to track down a killer.

A voracious reader and a knowledgeable fan of well-crafted thrillers and mysteries, my sister-in-law has been talking about Alex Kava for almost a decade. The author divides her time between Omaha and Pensacola, so she's known as one of our local authors. I'm not sure why I haven't followed Jen's advice to give Kava's Maggie O'Dell novels a chance, but after reading her upcoming release (#8 in the series), I'm ready to dive into the backlist.

My husband and I flew out to San Diego for Memorial Day weekend and I started in on my ARC of Damaged as soon as we boarded our flight. This is the perfect kind of book for traveling--short chapters, snappy dialogue, and enough suspense to keep me reading even during take-off and landing. In Damaged, Kava refers to previous cases involving FBI special agent and profiler, Maggie O'Dell, yet it didn't bother me to start with the last in this series. I read it knowing I might discover a spoiler or two, but since I have several other books lined up to read this summer, those details will probably be forgotten by the time I get around to reading the very first Maggie O'Dell novel, A Perfect Evil. However, knowing how quickly I was engrossed in this book, I may want to get a couple more in the series for my travels in July. While not quite as gritty as John Sandford's Prey series, Damaged has piqued my interest and I look forward to working my way through Kava's backlist. Thanks for the recommendation, Jen!

About the author (from her website):

ALEX KAVA GREW UP IN THE COUNTRY just outside of Silver Creek, Nebraska, and earned a bachelor’s degree in art and English from College of Saint Mary in Omaha, Nebraska. She has done a variety of jobs, from working as a hospital tech, cleaning and sterilizing utensils from surgery, pathology and the morgue; to running her own graphic design firm, designing national food labels and directing television and radio commercials.

IN 1996 SHE QUIT HER JOB as a public relations director to dedicate herself to writing a novel and getting published. To pay the bills, she refinanced her home, maxed out her credit cards and even took on a newspaper delivery route.

A YEAR AND A HALF LATER A PERFECT EVIL WAS FINISHED. In July 1998 she landed an agent and in February 1999, she signed a three-book contract with MIRA Books. In June 2000 she was in Chicago, sitting next to Barbara Kingsolver at BookExpo America, and signing advanced reader copies.

TODAY, ALEX IS A NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR of psychological suspense novels. Her Maggie O’Dell series, comprised of A Perfect Evil, Split Second, The Soul Catcher, At the Stroke of Madness, A Necessary Evil, Exposed and Black Friday along with her stand-alone novels, One False Move and Whitewash, have been widely praised by critics and fans. They have appeared on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. Her books have been published in twenty-four countries and have hit the bestseller lists in Australia, Germany, Poland, Italy and the UK. She is also one of the featured writers in the anthology Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night, edited by James Patterson.

ONE FALSE MOVE WAS SELECTED AS Nebraska’s 2006 One Book One Nebraska. (My Antonia by Willa Cather was the 2005 selection). In 2007 Alex was awarded the Mari Sandoz Award by the Nebraska Library Association. Whitewash made January Magazine’s list of best thrillers for 2007. Both Exposed and Black Friday received starred reviews by Publishers Weekly.

2010 marks Alex’s ten year anniversary as an author with the publication of her tenth novel, Damaged (Doubleday, July 13th). She also has co-authored two short stories in anthologies to be published in June and August: First Thrills, edited by Lee Child (After Dark, co-authored with Deb Carlin) and Florida Heat Wave, edited by Michael Lister (A Breath of Hot Air, co-authored with Patricia Bremmer).

ALEX WRITES FULL-TIME AND LIVES IN Omaha, Nebraska and Pensacola, Florida (where her new book, Damaged is set). She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the International Thrillers Writers.

Looks like Kava and her dog are both Husker fans. Go Big Red! :)



More information about Alex Kava can be found here. Be sure to check out this link to Behind the Scenes of Damaged.