By Patrick Anderson,
whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers@aol.com
Monday, April 16, 2007

ANATOMY OF FEAR

By Jonathan Santlofer

Morrow. 358 pp. $24.95

Jonathan Santlofer's fourth novel serves up numerous elements you know well if you read many thrillers. The NYPD is on the trail of a serial killer. He turns out to be a psychopath with ties to neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. The NYPD is battling arrogant FBI agents who want to take over the case. We're rooting for a feisty, sexy woman detective who confronts endless sexism from male colleagues. Been there, done that.

But what makes "Anatomy of Fear" distinctive is that Santlofer, a well-known artist before he turned to fiction, has illustrated the book with well over a hundred drawings that add an intriguing new dimension to his story. The pencil sketches, some with touches of blood red, show victims, suspects, crime scenes and clues. Some no larger than a postage stamp, others filling an entire page, these drawings illustrate the novel and become central to it, because both its hero and its villain are themselves artists caught up in a deadly duel.

The hero, Nate Rodriguez, son of a Puerto Rican police officer and a Jewish social worker, is glimpsed as a wild youth who, at age 12 or so, was getting high on both booze and pot. His exploits led to his father's death, for which he still feels agonizing guilt. He tried being a cop, but he couldn't stomach life on the street, so he used his artistic skills to become a police sketch artist, one of the best in America. Early in the book we see him work with a rape victim to produce a drawing of her attacker that soon leads to an arrest. The artist is a student of faces, skilled at reading "fleeting micro-expressions." He can spot "a big smile, all lips, no eye muscles, totally fake." Words lie, he says; faces do not.

Homicide detective Terri Russo recruits Rodriguez because two men have been murdered on the street and the killer left drawings of the victims pinned to their bodies. She wants to know if the same person drew both pictures, and Rodriguez assures her that he did. He joins her team, and more murders follow. We learn that Rodriguez has psychic powers -- he calls them brain flashes -- that enable him to draw people and events he has never seen: "I couldn't stop the pictures in my head -- a by-product of a life spent inventing them."

Some plot twists are predictable. The good-looking Puerto Rican Jewish sketch artist and the sexy Italian American detective soon begin a romance that leads to her memorable declaration, "I just don't want to spend six months on some goon who is never going to commit." The killer learns about Rodriguez and begins stalking him -- and those lunkheads at the FBI suspect that Rodriguez may in fact be the killer.

In his tribulations, he's supported by his Puerto Rican grandmother, who practices a form of voodoo when she thinks he's threatened by evil spirits. At one point, to exorcise evil, she breaks an egg into a pitcher of water and pours it over his torso, then crushes some gladioluses and rubs them onto his chest. "I shivered, a kind of electric energy coursing through my body," he says of this messy process, which readers are not advised to try at home.

The more dangerous evil spirits may be the NYPD and FBI officials who -- in this novel and countless others -- are quick to pin the rap on anyone who is conveniently at hand. At one point, two FBI agents, both women, eye Rodriguez eagerly:

" 'I found Rodriguez to be an amiable, charming guy. But I don't have to tell you that fits a whole category of sociopaths.'

" 'Bundy, for one.'

" 'You ever read the transcripts of Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler?' "

The moral is that if you ever find a dead body, run for your life.

Fortunately, Rodriguez eludes these zealots, which may be more easily done in books than in reality, and he will no doubt return to sketch again. "Anatomy of Fear" is an amiable novel. If some of its elements are familiar, the author's drawings and his insights into an artist's mind are refreshingly new, and he keeps things moving at a jaunty clip.

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Speaking of cops, a year ago I praised the novel "18 Seconds," by retired D.C. police lieutenant George D. Shuman. It's been nominated as one of the best first novels of 2006 by the International Thriller Writers. Washingtonian Daniel Silva's latest Gabriel Allon novel, "The Messenger," is among the best-novel nominees. The winners will be announced at ITW's ThrillerFest in New York in July.