Cold Blooded by Diane O’Toole

Cold Blooded, which BNBS published in 2016, is the sequel to Rings of Smoke, I edited this book and provided the blurb and came up with the chilling strapline from the Hippocratic Oath: If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life.

Synopsis

This is the story of a serial killer (Leonard Fitch) who escapes the clutches of the law and almost certain death in a fire at his Lakeland lodge, to start a new life (and with it a continuation of his killing spree) in America.

The police had closed the case on Fitch, believing him to be dead, but a birthday card sent to his last “victim” twelve months after mysteriously releasing her alive causes quite a stir. The card was sent from Boston, Massachusetts, raising doubts as to its authenticity, but when the handwriting analysis comes back with an almost certain match the case is re-opened. Set in the 1970’s, means of identification were limited and so two detectives set out to discover the truth behind the badly burned body found at the scene twelve months earlier. DC Jones and DS Harris were the detectives assigned to the case originally so it falls upon them to establish the facts.

Fitch managed to escape the country and with his new identity made his way to Chicago where he set off for the West Coast along the historic Route 66. There was plenty of new material for him to work on along the way to San Francisco, where he intended to find work as a Consultant Neurologist. With a change in name came a change in modus operandi, as Fitch reverted to his earlier style of going for the quick kill – not as much fun but the same result.

He eventually settles in Auburn, on the outskirts of Sacramento, and just an hour’s drive from Lake Tahoe, where he buys a weekend retreat in a remote part of the forest. Now he can get down to business and he can continue where he left off back in the English Lake District.

On a medical conference in Boston, late October 1978, Fitch decides to send a birthday card to Erin Fallon, the girl he chose not to kill, but to return to her family a year earlier.

Jones and Harris are sent to the States to assist the SFPD in unravelling the mystery of a series of disappearances, which they believe could be linked to their man Fitch. A family bereavement means that Harris has to return to England, but Jones stays on and vows to bring Fitch back, “dead or alive.”

On hearing this development, Fitch is both amused and excited, and a game of cat and mouse ensues. Fitch finally meets his Nemesis in a blistering climax.