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Splintered (Hunting Evil: Book One)
By SJD Peterson
DSP Publications, 2016
Cover by Reese Dante
Four stars

A good, edgy, page-turning read, “Splintered�� is the first in a series that, I assume, stars FBI profiler Todd Hutchinson (Hutch) and his team, Granite (Travis Green) and Byte (Andrew Caswell). Our guys have been flown to Chicago when the seemingly random discovery of a mutilated body in an isolated woodland appears to link up to as many as seventeen similar killings scattered over a wide area around the city. Now they’ve got a gay-hating serial killer on their hands.

Hutch is gay, thirty-something, and perfectly happy with that. He has an ability to get inside the head of murderers, and worries about what this might say about him. Granite is Goth on the outside, FBI on the inside, and is one of Hutch’s few close friends. Byte, a rogue hacker given to Armani suits, performs data-based miracles to help his team find killers.

When their background research turns up a twenty-six-year-old PhD candidate in criminal psychology, Noah Walker, Hutch and his buddies think they might have found their man. This turns out to be true, but not in the way they expected.

I liked all these guys; I liked the way they’re angry about police homophobia; I like the way the straight Granite teases Hutch with a long-running sexual joke that makes them both laugh. I liked Noah, obsessed and damaged, as he blunders into an investigation that’s bigger than even he understood, and realizes that he might just fit the profile of a serial killer.

The romance at the center of this thriller was, to me, awkwardly drawn. Not that I disapproved, but I just found the way Peterson handled it was clumsy. But hey, they’re her characters, not mine. I chose to go along for the ride; and I really look forward to the next installment of “Hunting Evil.��