The Keeper

I raced through this fat book. My advanced reader's copy is 553 pages and I read it in a very short time because I couldn't stand not knowing what would happen next. I was so scared for the victims.

You know from the beginning that a man with a psychosis of some sort is keeping two women in cages in a cellar. He seems to be fixated on women who have a similar appearance and he keeps calling the current favorite Sam. When she tries to tell him that isn't her name, he gets enraged and takes it out on the other one. When he takes a woman he is armed with a stun gun and chloroform, so she's aware she is being kidnapped but unable to do anything about it. Can you imagine how terrifying that is?

The cop heading the investigation is D.I. Sean Corrigan from the Murder Investigation Unit in South London. His own past history gives him intuitive insight into the motives of psychotic murderers. He is quite a strange investigator as he tries to get into the mind of such people to solve the case and catch the killer. Thankfully he is married to a doctor who loves him enough to bear with him during his cases, keep up with her own job, and care for their three children. His family is what saves him from going off the deep end himself.

Ordinarily a story featuring a mentally ill villain is tough for me to read, but I was so caught up in this one that I just couldn't put it aside without finishing it. If you read this one, and I encourage you to do so, brace yourself for a tense time. You might also want to lock your doors.

Highly recommended

I enjoy the characters very much and love the London setting. But, I agree with most other reviewers that the graphic nature of the torture was too much. So much time in the book was devoted to describing what the women captured had to go through.I've read many other books involving captures and tortures but no others spent so much time in detailing this. I just ordered the next book but hope it isn't quite so frightening.

Really good British criminal novel. Sean is a gifted and highly intuitive detective who we get to see at work solving this missing persons case. And in parallel segments we learn about the victims and the perpetrator. Interesting study of who is observing whom.

My first time to read Luke Delaney. Pretty good cop story. Just a little bit too much psychological stuff involved. Know it is part of the story but dwells just little much. Would still reccomend it as a good read.

Could not put it down. Read this book in a day!

Thomas Keller is a pathetic little man - abused and abandoned as a child. . .the subject of ridicule and humiliation at the hands of his co-workers as an adult, he searches desperately for the one person who has ever shown him kindness. In The Keeper, author Luke Delaney effectively takes his readers into the mind of a mad man and Thomas Keller is utterly and completely mad. . .a ticking time bomb primed to explode at any moment. Keller's ill-fated star is about to collide with that of DI Sean Corrigan, an unusual man who seems to have an almost supernatural ability to enter the mind of the killer in the crimes he investigates. Sean is charged with finding a missing woman despite the fact that his usual field of expertise is murder investigation. And the case suddenly turns into a murder investigation when a body is discovered, even though it's not the missing woman. The killer seems to be taking and keeping the same woman again and again and, as if there isn't enough pressure on Sean to solve the case , he must conduct his investigation under the most stressful of circumstances. His sergeant, Sally Jones is recovering from a traumatic and mentally crippling injury which may have left her unfit for duty, his wife Kate is pressuring him to move to New Zealand to make a better life for his family and DI Corrigan is saddled with a bête noir in the very attractive form of Anna Ravenni-Ceron, a criminal psychiatrist, whose help he neither wants nor needs. This book is terrifyingly gripping. I absolutely could not put it down! It doesn't just take us into the mind of the killer, but even more chilling....we are forced to enter the minds of the victims. We sense their fear. . .their determination to survive...and ultimately their hopeless acceptance of their fates. I highly recommend The Keeper to readers who are hooked on psychological thrillers. The book is well-written, the plot is complex and the characters exceptionally well-developed. There are a lot of twists and turns along the road and an ending that is both satisfying and titillating. Don't turn off the lights. . .especially if your name is Sam! :-D