Bookstore

CRIME/DISASTER/SOUTHERN/
PARTNER SLEUTHS/
POLICE PROCEDURAL/
SERIAL KILLER/SUSPENSE/
THRILLER/TRADITIONAL/
WHODUNIT MYSTERY
last known victim
Amid death and destruction, hurricane-ravaged New Orleans has a new dark force to fear.  As rescue efforts unfold, a grisly discovery is made at one of the massive refrigerator "graveyards": One of these metal hulks contain six human hands--all female, all right hands. The press has dubbed the unknown perpetrator “The Handyman.” Casting aside the very "rule book" by which she has lived her life, Captain Patti O’Shay is fearless-- but so is the killer. As she is stalked Patti is forced to question all she believes in, to match wits with a murderer...because if she doesn't find The Handyman first, she will become the LAST KNOWN VICTIM.
Read A Review:

Last Known Victim" is clear evidence that Spindler is a master at her romantic/thriller art. With two dozen or so books under her writing belt, she's had lots of practice -- and lots of success.

Diana Pinckley, New Orleans Times Picayune


Hundreds of New Orleans-area writers were uprooted, re-invented, and hung out to dry after Hurricane Katrina left her scars. Mandeville resident Erica Spindler knew she had some big gaps to fill with her best-selling cop series set in the slowly-recovering Big Easy. Last Known Victim (Mira Books, $24.95) boasts a hurricane of a plot, whipped up weird and spicy as only a Katrina survivor could tell it.

Straight arrow NOPD Captain Patti O’Shay receives the shock of her life three days into the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina. There’s been a murder in upscale Audubon Place. Patti’s AWOL husband Sammy, a fellow NOPD captain, is the victim of a shooting. His badge and gun are missing. Weeks later, another grisly discovery is made among New Orleans’ refrigerator graveyards: an icebox containing the remains of six hands; all right hands, all female.

Flash forward to April, 2007. No leads have been found in either Sammy’s murder or the media-dubbed Handyman slayings. All that’s about to change. In City Park, unearthed skeletal remains reveal a young female…her right hand absent. The body, possibly buried in Katrina’s wake, is accompanied by a police badge. Yep, you know the one.

An emotionally-scarred Patti O’Shay gets her mojo workin’. But Patti’s not the same by-the-book cop she once was. At a sleazy French Quarter bar, officer Stacy Killian goes undercover to help bust a meth dealer. Spindler soon crosshatches plots to reveal a fiend known as the Artist. Might the Artist have a penchant for severed right hands and police badges? Yvette Borger, a dancer at the bar where Stacy is undercover, thinks she’s the Artist’s next target. Stacy and her cop boyfriend Spencer Malone (Patti’s nephew) reluctantly try to help Yvette and a renegade Patti from making a lethal mistake in their zeal to catch the killer. What follows is nothing short of a moldy southern gothic as explosive as K-Ville.

In Last Known Victim, Spindler breathes harsh, raw energy into her Crescent City cops, making them damaged survivors of a flooded crime wave that keeps getting deeper. Take a Big Easy tour down Erica Spindler’s mean streets. This lady knows her turf . . . and her terror.

JC Patterson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger