Jonathan Nasaw – författare

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 is the strawberry blond color 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 disemboweled strawberry blond 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 on a secluded ridge in Oregon, Irene must navigate through the minefield of her captor''s various egos -- male and female, brilliant and nave, 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. A 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 final, 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 likable sleuths in recent fiction.

'As his eyes adjusted to the light, what appeared at first to be a can of ivory-coloured sticks proved to be a can of disarticulated bones, some long and thin, flared out delicately at the ends, others roundish, like irregularly-shaped stones, and still others short, with conical tips. They were of course the bones of a human hand. If he'd counted, he'd have found twenty-seven of them - eight carpals, five metacarpals and fourteen phalanges.' Although officially retired, ex-Special Agent Pender can't ignore a plea for help from an old friend - especially when there's an all expenses paid trip to the Caribbean attached. Julian Coffee, St Luke's chief of police, needs Pender's help to track down a serial killer known as the 'Machete Man' because of his habit of cutting off the right hand of his victims. Pender is about to discover the strangest and most baffling case of his long career.

Just as he's celebrating his last day on the job, FBI agent E L Pender receives a letter from Dorie Bell. Dorie is afraid. Last year she attended a convention for Persons with Specific Phobia Disorder. Since then, a couple of the delegates have died in suspicious circumstances. Carl Polander had acrophobia. Fear of heights. So what would he be doing on the 12th floor of the building the police say he jumped from? Mara Agajanian had haemophobia. Fear of blood. So how could she have cut her own wrists in the bathtub? Dorie, who suffers from an irrational fear of masks, wants Pender to look into these cases. She suspects there may be a twisted serial killer on the loose. Someone, who quite literally, enjoys scaring his victims to death. Dorie's right. But she has no idea just how close to her the killer is...

From Jonathan Nasaw, whose heart-stopping debut was hailed as "a superior thriller" (The Washington Post) and "wickedly compelling" (The Oregonian), comes a new novel that takes readers into the depths of Fear Itself Is it possible to be scared to death? FBI Special Agent E. L. Pender thinks so -- when a man afraid of heights falls nineteen stories to his death and a woman terrified of blood is found with her wrists slashed. Could it be that the apparent suicides are actually the work of a twisted psychopath? To stop him, Pender joins forces with Investigative Specialist Linda Abruzzi, and before long they find themselves facing their own worst terrors -- and a madman who is as immune to fear as he is fascinated by it.

The brilliant author of Fear Itself pulls readers into an intricate web of ritual killings orchestrated by an evil pair of murderers who always manage to be one step ahead of the law. Former FBI Special Agent E.L. Pender may be retired, but he jumps at the chance to help solve a particularly gruesome series of crimes in the U.S. Virgin Islands. This is no ordinary case, seeing as the right hand on each body in the string of murders is missing. The police want to keep the existence of a serial killer under wraps; they hope to solve the crime before a stampede sets in. Meanwhile, Pender is convinced the killer must be the husband of the last victim and sets out to capture him -- but he''s only partly right. The husband is connected to the case, but the real murderers are a cunning husband-and-wife team of archeologists who believe that if they breathe in their victim''s last breath they will live forever. Never before has Pender come up against such savvy, diabolical opponents. From one trail of dead ends to another, readers will feel Pender''s fever to prevent more murders from occurring...and his sheer panic when he can''t. Twenty-Seven Bones is that most quintessential of thrilling reads, providing a visceral experience of chills and excitement on every page.

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 is the strawberry blond color 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 disemboweled strawberry blond 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 on a secluded ridge in Oregon, Irene must navigate through the minefield of her captor''s various egos -- male and female, brilliant and nave, 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.A 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 final, 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 likable sleuths in recent fiction.

The author of Twenty-Seven Bones and The Girls He Adored delivers another nailbiting thriller featuring former FBI agent E. L. Pender. Breathtaking and suspenseful, yet leavened with a perverse and quirky humor, When She Was Bad examines the terrifying relationship between two hot young lovers who also happen to be coldblooded killers. "Multiples in love: imagine the possibilities," said one of the twisted couple''s earlier victims. Lily DeVries and Ulysses Maxwell have quite a few things in common. Both were horrifically abused as children, then diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, and eventually incarcerated in the same Oregon mental institution. There, they fell into the hands of the well-meaning, genially sinister director, Dr. Al. When the ingenious lovers engineer a bloody escape, the only people who have a chance of stopping them are the rumpled, endearingly flawed E. L. Pender and Dr. Irene Cogan, a brilliant psychiatrist who loves Lily almost as much as she fears Maxwell. With the aid of a private investigator, Pender and Cogan take on a pair of killers who win hearts as easily as they slit throats. A sexually charged thriller of undeniable originality and page-turning suspense, When She Was Bad moves at a rapid clip from the inner recesses of two twisted psyches to a terrifying climax and brilliantly realized finale. Emotionally taut and difficult to put down, this tale of sex, romance, madness, and murder will not disappoint.

In his four previous novels of suspense, Jonathan Nasaw gave readers a charming and unlikely hero against the forces of evil in former FBI agent E.L. Pender. Now, in The Boys from Santa Cruz, Pender faces his most terrifying foe to date. Like James Patterson and John Connolly, Jonathan Nasaw has proven time and again that he has an uncanny, almost eerie, knack for getting inside the labyrinthine and horrifying minds of the most deranged serial killers. In Fear Itself, Nasaw first introduced Pender, a rumpled, endearingly flawed investigator who immediately won readers’ hearts. In The Girls He Adored, Pender defeated a perverted psycho named Max, then went on to face The Machete Man in Twenty-Seven Bones, called a “skin-crawling, gory psycho-thriller” by the Scottish Daily Record. When last we left Pender, in Nasaw’s sexually charged thriller When She Was Bad, he took on a pair of mentally insane killers and nearly lost himself in the dark and blood-drenched recesses of their two twisted psyches. With his lust for terror and a frightening talent for getting deep under his readers’ skins, Nasaw promises to deliver more gripping action and unimaginably gruesome detail as he introduces readers to the bloodthirsty The Boys from Santa Cruz.

In his four previous novels of suspense, Jonathan Nasaw gave readers a charming and unlikely hero against the forces of evil in former FBI agent E.L. Pender. Now, in The Boys from Santa Cruz, Pender faces his most terrifying foe to date. Like James Patterson and John Connolly, Jonathan Nasaw has proven time and again that he has an uncanny, almost eerie, knack for getting inside the labyrinthine and horrifying minds of the most deranged serial killers. In Fear Itself, Nasaw first introduced Pender, a rumpled, endearingly flawed investigator who immediately won readers’ hearts. In The Girls He Adored, Pender defeated a perverted psycho named Max, then went on to face The Machete Man in Twenty-Seven Bones, called a “skin-crawling, gory psycho-thriller” by the Scottish Daily Record. When last we left Pender, in Nasaw’s sexually charged thriller When She Was Bad, he took on a pair of mentally insane killers and nearly lost himself in the dark and blood-drenched recesses of their two twisted psyches. With his lust for terror and a frightening talent for getting deep under his readers’ skins, Nasaw promises to deliver more gripping action and unimaginably gruesome detail as he introduces readers to the bloodthirsty The Boys from Santa Cruz.