The Angel Maker

A Lou Boldt - Daphne Matthews Novel, Book 2

By: Ridley Pearson

Narrated by: Jeff Cummings

At The Shelter, no one judges the runaway teens who come in off the rainy Seattle streets. Volunteers, like police psychologist Daphne Matthews, want only to rescue and rebuild lives. Being a cop, Daphne thinks she's seen it all. But, as best-selling author Ridley Pearson's edge-of-your-seat thriller opens, what she encounters in a 16-year-old girl chills her in a way she thought a case no longer could.

For help, Daphne turns to the best cop she knows: Lou Boldt, a man with creative instincts and an appreciation for forensic lab techniques. Boldt isn't a cop anymore; he's playing jazz piano in a downtown club and doing his best to forget the past. When Daphne puts her evidence on the table, Boldt is hooked. By all appearances someone is illegally harvesting human organs for transplant.

Soon the two cops - and former lovers - are drawn into the dark vortex of a high-tech, highly profitable underground industry, and into the mind of its founder: a doctor gone very, very bad; a man who began by trying to save patients unable to get donor organs through legitimate channels; a healer who let ambition, or something more sinister, turn him into a killer.

The case gets personal when Daphne's friend and fellow Shelter volunteer Sharon Shaffer is abducted, and evidence left behind indicates she's about to become the killer's next organ donor. Daphne and Boldt have only days, hours, minutes to save Sharon from a killer about to make one final, unforgettable contribution to humankind. Meanwhile a woman caught in a nightmare of captivity rattles the bars of a secret makeshift prison, too far from civilization for anyone to hear her scream.

Written with a researched realism so convincing that the story could have come from today's headlines, Ridley Pearson's The Angel Maker will hold listeners spellbound as it explores the passion to create life, and the power to destroy it. This is a novel so shattering, so bizarre, and so terrifying that it raises the specter of a future humanity where the question of who will live depends on who must die to ensure it.

©2012 Ridley Pearson (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

A Lew Bolt and Daphne Mathews book.

Lew Bolt has taken an extended leave of absence from the Seattle Police Department. His wife, Liz, had a baby, and he is being “house mom” staying at home taking care of his son while Liz works, and then playing piano in a jazz club at night. But one night, Daphne Matthews, a forensic psychologist working for the police and a close friend of Bolt’s from the past, shows up and sparks his interest in a potential case. Daphne is volunteering time at a teen shelter for runaways. A girl shows up one day and seems very ill and is bleeding. They take her to the hospital and find that she has recently had surgery and a kidney has been removed. It has not been done in a hospital and may not have been done by a doctor. Daphne and the rest of the police department become involved in a possible organ transplant sale which crosses international boundaries. This is quite a good book and also quite terrifying.

Terrible reader

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The story is a standard police thriller. Totally functional, if predictable.

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

Story revolves around Organ Harvesting.

Any additional comments?

The reader is terrible. He's fine except for when he has to do dialog and voices, at which point he so mis-interprets the voices that he undercuts the story utterly.