A twisted and sexually charged thriller of extraordinary originality and page-turning suspense, 'The Girls He Adored' moves furiously from the inner recesses of the psyche to its startling climax. Jonathan Nasaw brilliantly portrays two equally intense characters - a deviant killer and the expert who can unlock his darkest secrets - and introduces one of the most likeable sleuths in recent fiction.
For ten years, the charmingly disheveled veteran FBI Special Agent E L Pender has been investigating the apparently random disappearances of a dozen women across the country. The only detail the cases have in common in the strawberry blonde colour of the victims' hair, and the presence of a mystery man with whom they were last seen.
Then, in Monterey, California, a routine traffic stop erupts into a scene of horrific violence. The local police are stunned by a disembowelled strawberry blonde victim and an ingenious killer with multiple alternating personalities. Pender is convinced he has found his man, but before he can prove it, the suspect stages a cunning jailbreak and abducts his court-appointed psychiatrist, Irene Cogan.
In a house of horrors on a secluded ridge in Oregon, Irene must navigate through he minefield of her captor's various egos - male and female, brilliant and naive, murderous and passive - all of whom are dominated by Max, a seductive killer who views her as both his prisoner and his salvation. Irene knows that to survive she must play along with Max's game of sexual perversion. Only then will she be able to strip back the layers to discover a chilling story of a shattered young boy - and all the girls he adored.
