The Crush - Softcover

Brown, Sandra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446613053 ISBN 13: 9780446613057

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2003

Synopsis

After she unwittingly frees a dangerous contract killer, a surgeon reluctantly joins forces with a tenacious detective obsessed with taking down their enemy at all costs.

As a surgeon, Dr. Rennie Newton is the consummate professional. When she's summoned to jury duty, she brings competence and composure to the courtroom -- a skill she learned while performing surgeries. It is this commitment to precision that compels her to deliver a not guilty verdict in the murder case against notorious contract killer Ricky Lozada.

It will be the most regrettable decision of her life. When a rival colleague is brutally slain, Lozada's menacing shadow looms over the murder, but the investigators pinpoint Rennie as the prime suspect. Soon, the police begin violating the privacy she has cultivated and protected at all costs. And when Lozada begins an earnest courtship, it becomes terrifyingly clear that he is obsessed with having her.

Wick Threadgill is a detective on indefinite leave from the Fort Worth PD with a very personal agenda for the contract killer. Temperamental, bitter, and driven by loyalty and love, Wick is determined to destroy Lozada. In order to defeat him -- and save their own lives -- Rennie and Wick form an uneasy alliance.

Mistrustful of each other, they know only one thing with absolute certainty: like one of Lozada's prize scorpions, they won't see it coming when this killer strikes. The Crush will take you on a tortuous path through a twisted sociopath's eerie obsession, a haunted man's fragile hopes for redemption, and a woman's heart as she struggles to face her greatest fear: to open herself to love.

About this title

Review:

When Dr. Rennie Newton's jury duty on a case involving a contract killer ends in an acquittal for Ricky Lozada, her carefully composed and very private life begins to unravel. First, someone breaks into her house to leave her an anonymous dozen red roses. Then her colleague and one-time rival for the chief of surgery job is murdered in the parking lot of her hospital, which makes her a prime suspect, especially when the police learn that she's killed a man once before. None of that stops Detective Wick Threadgill from falling in love with her; unlike his partner, he's sure that Lozada, not Rennie, is behind Howell's murder. And it soon becomes clear that the killer is so obsessed with Rennie that he'll do anything to have her--including killing again. Brown, master of the romantic mystery, goes into darker territory here, but she handles it with her usual deftness and turns in a well-paced if not particularly heart-stopping thriller with the requisite happy ending for Rennie and Wick. --Jane Adams

About the Author:

Sandra Brown is the author of seventy-one New York Times bestsellers. There are over eighty million copies of her books in print worldwide, and her work has been translated into thirty-four languages. She lives in Texas. For more information you can visit www.SandraBrown.net.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0446613053
• ISBN 13: 9780446613057
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480