Stranger in the Room
Amanda Kyle Williams
Bantam Books, $26, 320 pages
Info Box:
7:15 p.m., Sept. 12, free talk, reading and signing, Decatur Library Auditorium, 215 Sycamore St., Decatur, 404-370-8450, Ext. 2225, http://www.georgiacenterforthebook.org/
“My name is Keye Street. I run a little detective agency in Atlanta called Corporate Intelligence & Investigations … My background is in law enforcement, criminology, psychology and, well, drinking. I was once a criminal investigative analyst in the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) at the Bureau. But I set fire to that and to nearly everything else in my life back then. So this is what I do now.”
What’s not to like about an Atlanta PI with a drinking problem? It’s been a year since we first met her—the Chinese-American alcoholic-turned-Krispy-Kreme-junkie and former FBI profiler who survived a summer trapped in a deadly cat-and-mouse hunt for a serial killer nicknamed “Wishbone.”
We fell in love with her tenth-floor Georgian Terrace apartment (overlooking the Fox Theatre), her Reddi-whip eating cat (“White Trash”), and her stoner sidekick, Neil. Not to mention a kick-ass attitude crossed with a wicked sense of humor that made her one of the most addictive new series heroines since Stephanie Plum.
Now, Keye’s back in “The Stranger in the Room.” She still gets turned on when the neon sign at 295 Ponce de Leon screams “Hot Doughnuts Now.” And she wants a drink more than ever.
Amanda Kyle Williams introduced the delightfully flawed and perennially stressed-out ex-profiler in last year’s “The Stranger You Seek,” a breakout debut that saw Keye starting afresh with a small, midtown detective agency and a growing roster of corporate clients. But her appetite for pursuing “the badly behaved” turned out to be second only to her craving for a dirty martini, and she’d rather wrestle with a desperate bail jumper than run another nanny background check.
“Which means I trail around behind certain folks, search their trash, take unwanted pictures of them, listen in on their conversations … and generally intrude on their private affairs. It’s all very glamorous. There’s a pile of Little Debbie wrappers and Starbucks cups in my car to prove it.”
The bigger fish she fries in both books come courtesy of homicide detective Aaron Rauser, who hires Keye as a consultant when his cases require her expert advice. An lieutenant 12 years her senior, who at 50 is “more Tommy Lee than Richard Gere, more Gyllenhaal than Pitt,” Rauser is also her love interest in the series.
But their sexy, grown-up relationship can’t compete with the wisecracking, dumb-and-dumber rapport Keye shares with her unruly partner Neil Donovan—half brilliant computer hacker, half kid brother. Watching him work his cell phone, Keye muses: “He might have been Tweeting, or stealing the formula for Coca Cola or making the garage doors in his neighborhood go up and down.”
“Stranger in the Room” finds Keye once again juggling several cases, beginning with an attempt to track down the stranger of the title, a stalker who seems to be after her cousin, Miki. Rauser asks for help solving the murder of a young boy, strangled and left on a footpath in Fulton County. Keye and Neil look into a convenience-store robber with an unusual, er, weapon; and a client who discovers that the cremains in his deceased mother’s urn aren’t exactly human—a gruesome take on a case familiar to anyone who watched the news back in 2002 when the Tri-State crematory made national headlines.
In the background, bodies begin to pile up, evidence linking them draws Keye in as psychological consultant, and once again, her well-meaning efforts to solve the crimes for the APD place her directly in the killer’s sights.
By sending her characters all over the Georgia map—Keye’s cases lead her from the international wilds of Buford Highway to a gated community in the mountains and back to her cousin’s Victorian home in Inman Park—Williams takes readers on an unofficial tour of the city. It’s hot: “Atlanta’s smoldering summer had dropped down around us like a burning building,” and from the greasy fast food to the gourmet salads to the home-baked Southern lemon bars, it’s impossible to get through this book without sweating, salivating, or slavering over one of those frosty alcoholic beverages calling out to Keye in every chapter.
Her addictions make Keye a compassionate protector when it comes to her flamboyant, suicidal cousin Miki. But it’s hard to say who teeters more on the brink of a backslide.
“The old tapes were playing, telling me … I wanted a drink. I didn’t. Not ever. I reminded myself it wasn’t real. Just the mind stalking shadowy old corridors. I reeled myself in, knowing that each time I did that, each time I said no, new pathways were burned into me that might help avert the next crisis.”
Those shadowy recesses are something Keye shares with the killers she knows so well: a history of childhood trauma—including the brutal murder of her grandparents as she stood helplessly by—that has groomed her for criminal profiling: “An intricate series of dominoing takes place in one’s life,” she tells us, “after murder’s big net tangles you up.”
For now, the tantalizing glimpses of Keye’s family skeletons are just that, but the questions she’s begun to ask—why was she adopted by a white couple, what really happened to her drug addicted parents?— suggest that next year’s installment could dig more deeply into her past. It’s just possible that she’ll find the answers to her questions in another stranger’s dark corridors.
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