The idea of a killer killing authors using one of the author's fictional murder scenarios in real life sounded intriguing, but the idea was not fully developed within the novel, leaving me a bit confused. The agents use a sophisticated program called LINKS to map out various parts of the crimes and crime scenes, but in only the first two is anything mentioned about the manner of death being similar to a scene in the author's book. After that, the idea is never mentioned again--not even just a mention that they have the LINKS system scanning for scenes in an author's work that would match the manner of death. Since LINKS is coming up with no leads whatsoever, you'd think Naomi and Xue would be inputting as much information as they can into the program to try to get something.

I also did not understand what triggered the killer to start killing when he/she did.

Naomi seems to have a guy "in every port" that she sleeps with (which turned me off the character) and there's no indication that they know each other--until suddenly at the end, all are sitting together . . . It just didn't ring true to me. ( )