Bay under siege
With its scrawled astrological symbol on the cover and a mention of California serial murders, Meg Gardiner’s “Unsub” offers up a fictional, Zodiac-style killer who terrorizes the Bay Area in this fleetfooted thriller.
The killings, which began in the ’90s, have inexplicably resumed with the strangling and mauling of a couple in an Alameda County cornfield. The Prophet, as the killer is called, likes to kill pairs. He leaves cryptic messages at crime scenes and signs the bodies with his signature slashes — the mercury symbol, sometimes filled with liquid mercury just to add some poisonous fun for forensics.
Caitlyn Hendrix, a narcotics detective with the Alameda County Sheriff ’s Department, joins the team because her father, Mack, was the lead investigator in the first hunt for the Prophet. Caitlyn may be the only one who can talk to Mack. The original, doomed quest cost him his family, his career and ultimately his sanity. It also forged a deep rift between father and daughter, one that will have to be bridged before Caitlyn can get the information she needs.
The Prophet may have peaked in the ’90s, but now he’s back with a vengeance — and an upgrade. He finds his victims on dating sites. He stalks message boards crowded with obsessive fans. He uses malware and gives GPS coordinates just as often as poetic descriptions of place. Gardiner is clearly having fun with the 2.0 version. The killer taunts with cryptic messages, and the investigators taunt back. “This is not 1993,” Mack writes to the Prophet, “Forensics can peel your thoughts from the earth.”
Kudos to Gardiner for crafting a female detective who slides comfortably between hefting a manly SIG Sauer and gossip-jogging with her boyfriend’s ex-wife. A lot of tension rides on the fact that she’s young and eager. You begin to realize that the Prophet is going to squash her like a tick. The murders are horrifying — the heads of a lesbian couple are twisted 180 degrees, he slaughters them live on camera — and instead of killing once a year, now he’s bingemurdering over Easter week. Even the entire Alameda County law enforcement posse might not stand a chance against this seasoned psycho.
A killer’s true horror lies in the unknown — most of the real Zodiac’s letters could be organized code, or simply the random taunts of a madman. There could be the five victims we know about, or the 37 he claimed. The fact that he was never identified may mean he’s still out there. But fiction likes to tidy up its killers, moving them out of the messy box of chaos and rage and onto the stage of coherence. It provides answers to why people go on killing sprees, and what drives them to choose their victims. “Unsub” takes this impulse to dramatic heights as Caitlyn and the team uncover a narrative that structures the killer’s behavior (move over, Dan Brown) and that eventually allows the investigators to guess his next moves, even if they have no time to react.
The Prophet’s “narrative” make sense, being part of a war of good and evil. But it is still the neat version, nothing like the real Zodiac’s apparently random selection of victims and his bizarre claim to be collecting slaves for the afterlife. Yet there is definitely something satisfying in watching this fictional crime team slip puzzle pieces into place and reveal a grotesque picture of a man’s broken psyche.
When the Prophet stops terrorizing the Bay Area as a whole and starts to focus on Caitlyn, he goes from having a kind of Satanic power over the nine levels of hell to having a more human vulnerability: the guy who had a problem with That One Woman. The victims become personal — the people Caitlyn loves. In one awkward chapter, we meet the Prophet — we even get inside his head — and discover not a terrifying madman but an escapee from “Hillbilly Elegy” whose background feels depressingly stereotyped.
But the action blows past the bumps on the road. Caitlyn’s desperate quest to stop the killings becomes all-consuming, and toward the end, the book is hard to put down. Fans will delight in the ending, which opens a pathway to a sequel. True-crime fans be warned: This unsub (or unknown subject) is not the Zodiac. Thriller fans who like a strong shot of horror will be delighted by this gruesome and furiously fast-paced read.