RIVER by Roderick Thorp - FIRST EDITION BOOK

Phil Boudreau is a veteran detective with the Seattle vice squad. Tough, smart, impatient, he appreciates beautiful women and genuinely cares for the throwaway kids on his beat. Boudreau knows from the first that the murderer is cunning and brilliant. Then the details of one of the killings burn a name into Boudreau's mind: Garrett Richard Lockman. Sent to jail by Boudreau years before, Garrett Lockman is society's worst nightmare: a shrewd, manipulative career criminal driven by an unstoppable will and insatiable sexual needs. When Boudreau learns that Lockman had escaped from prison before the first killing, the detective conceives an obsession of his own: to prove that Lockman is the perpetrator of the most sadistic crimes one human being can commit against another. But Boudreau is powerless to act - through Lockman's machinations, he himself has become a suspect. As Boudreau stalks Lockman for eight grueling years, he realizes, to his horror, that the police department has become an accomplice in the unspeakable crimes. River reaches its shattering climax in an agonizing power struggle between psychopath and cop - a contest that Boudreau can win only by dispensing justice as cruel as Lockman's crimes.