The Killer in Me by Margot Harrison

Summary: Seventeen-year-old Nina Barrows knows all about the Thief. She’s intimately familiar with his hunting methods: how he stalks and kills at random, how he disposes of his victims’ bodies in an abandoned mine in the deepest, most desolate part of a desert. Now, for the first time, Nina has the chance to do something about the serial killer that no one else knows exists. With the help of her former best friend, Warren, she tracks the Thief two thousand miles, to his home turf—the deserts of New Mexico. But the man she meets there seems nothing like the brutal sociopath with whom she’s had a disturbing connection her whole life. To anyone else, Dylan Shadwell is exactly what he appears to be: a young veteran committed to his girlfriend and her young daughter. As Nina spends more time with him, she begins to doubt the truth she once held as certain: Dylan Shadwell is the Thief. She even starts to wonder . . . what if there is no Thief?

Ever since she was a little girl, Nina Barrows has shared the thoughts of another in her sleep. When she was younger, it was a comfort to slip into the boy’s mind. But then he grew up and started murdering people. Now, at seventeen, Nina spends her nights watching the boy plot untraceable murders and her days trying to track down his victims and prove to herself that the things she has seen are real. When she has the chance to disrupt a murder in another state, she enlists the help of her estranged friend Warren to drive through the night to get there in time. Warren is determined to help her see how she has been imagining all these frightening things – but then both of them are slammed with the truth of Nina’s connection to the killer. The point of view alternates between the haunted, determined Nina and the smart, wry Warren, with the shifts both building character insight and ratcheting story tension. I read the last quarter of the book in a late-night rush, then hid under the blankets with the light on. A psychological thriller deeply rooted in the relationships that define us, with gaspy twists that are one hundred percent earned.

THE KILLER IN ME is out now.

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