The Controller

★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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FBI Special Agent Sandra Rose is called out to the scene of a home invasion turned hostage situation. It feels routine, but serious – and when things go wrong in pretty unexpected ways, it goes really, really wrong – and lets you know right away that this is not a book for the faint of heart. As nasty as things start out, the tattoo on the perpetrator's back points to things getting worse, “half tattoo, half scar tissue,” is how it's initially described. Later we're told a bit more:

It was a Railroad tattoo. Carved by machete onto the man's back, coloured by blue tattoo ink. Two long parallel lines stretched the length of Razinski's back interspersed with a number of horizontal lines joining the two lines together.

known

The Controller

The Good:

She was working on little more than a hunch, and hunches were something she couldn't abide. Real police work was completed by hard work and diligence, by analysing facts and evidence. Hunches were for a bygone era, for rogue detectives, for fiction and television.

The Bad:

The Iffy:

The Iffy

The Bad

The Good

The Good

good