Damaged: A Maggie O’Dell Novel
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- ISBN13: 9780385531993
- Condition: New
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Product Description
New York Times bestselling leader Alex Kava joins the Doubleday list with her best novel yet.
On Pensacola Beach, the Coast Guard prepares for a Category 5 hurricane that has entered the Gulf of Mexico. When the air crew patrols the waterways, they spot a huge fishing cooler about a mile offshore. Drug traffickers have been known to dump coolers with smuggled product to avoid detection and pay fishermen to retrieve them. But when the crew open this cooler, they’re shocked by what they find: body parts tightly wrapped in plastic.
Though she is putting herself in the projected path of the hurricane, Special Agent Maggie O’Dell is sent to investigate. Eventually, she’s able to trace the torso in the cooler back to a man who mysteriously disappeared weeks earlier after a hurricane hit Port St. Lucie, Florida. Only Port St. Lucie is on the Atlantic side. How did his body end up six hundred miles away in the Gulf of Mexico?
Cliffhanger chapters, behind-the-scenes forensic details, colorful characters, and satisfying twists have become the trademarks of Kava’s psychological thrillers. In Hurt, she ratchets up the suspense a notch by sending Maggie into the eye of an impending monster hurricane to track down a killer.Amazon.com Review
Steve Berry Reviews Hurt
Steve Berry is the leader of six thrillers in the bestselling Cotton Malone series (The Templar Legacy, The Alexandria Link, The Venetian Treachery, The The Charlemagne Pursuit, The Paris Vendetta, and The Emperor’s Tomb), and three stand-alone thrillers (The Amber Room, The Romanov Prophecy, and The Third Secret). Read his guest review of Hurt:
Alex Kava is a master. Her heroine, Special Agent Maggie O’Dell, is one of the classic characters of the thriller genre. Maggie’s adventures have taken her to tiny-town America, and into the Catholic Church, bringing her face-to-face with some sick individuals. But that’s her job. She’s a criminal profiler. And excellent at it. Now, in Hurt, Maggie is thrust into the eye of an impending monster hurricane to track down another killer.
Alex Kava has a knack for the macabre. This time she hooks the reader when a fishing cooler is establish floating in the Gulf of Mexico filled with a human torso, one foot, and three hands, all tightly wrapped in plastic. Despite the fact that a Category 5 hurricane is just off shore, and headed her way, Maggie is sent to investigate. Resources are limited. All law enforcement is all ears on migration and urgent situation preparations. It’s Maggie’s job to find out what’s going on, but when she discovers that the remains belong to a man who mysteriously disappeared weeks earlier, after another hurricane hit on Florida’s Atlantic Ocean side, the real distress starts.
There’s a ton more to this tale, but I don’t want to give away too much. Let’s just say that it’s unexpected. Once again Alex Kava has fictitious a tale similar to speeding at a hundred miles an hour down a giant slalom course, with all its linked twists and turns. The whole thing starts quick and gets quicker. Maggie O’Dell is a brilliant and intricate heroine–at once witty, smart, and detailed, but permanently highly entertaining. Hurt is a book from a writer who knows how to deliver exactly what readers want. Alex Kava is in the top echelon of suspense masters and this one is not to be missed.
Questions for Alex Kava on Hurt
Q: Where did the inspiration for Hurt come from? Why did you choose to send Maggie O’Dell into the path of a deadly hurricane?
A: In spring of 2004 I bought a house on the bay just outside of Pensacola. Six months later Hurricane Ivan hit. Nine months after that, it was Dennis. I’ve lived most of my life in tornado country so I thought I was prepared for hurricanes. The anxiety and anticipation is excruciating. And nothing prepares you for the aftermath. It’s hard to clarify. It may sound a bit clichéd but there’s a transformation that takes place when you experience something like that, especially as a community. I’ve been wanting to throw Maggie into the path of a hurricane ever since.
Q: You write in fantastic detail about FBI processes and forensic investigations. How did you do research in these areas?
A: Real experts are still the best sources of information. I’ve been very fortunate to have contacts in a variety of law enforcement and forensic fields, people I can call or email with questions. Some have become close friends who share details of their cases with me over dinner. I’ve also had the privilege of visiting Quantico, and was able to spend some time down in the Behavioral Science Unit talking to special agents who do every day what I only write about.
What I don’t know, I read, constantly. I now have an wide library of my own and anyone who checked my laptop’s cache would probably be shocked to see the types of websites I surf on a regular basis.
Q: In Hurt, you write about the black market for human organs. Where did that thought come from and how did you research?
A: Several years ago I read a special report in USA Today about the illegal body parts business. It mentioned a case in Brooklyn involving a body broker and several funeral homes that were stealing tissue and bone from corpses, in some instances, replacing the bones with PVC piping and hiding the theft by sewing the bodies back up. Sometimes entire bodies were stolen as a replacement for of being sent to the crematory. The indictment charged that as many as 1,000 bodies may have stolen by this one group.
It fascinated me how greed could factually eviscerate a solemn practice that we take for granted and expect to be treated with dignity and respect.
From then on I ongoing searching for and saving anything I could find on the theme. I read several books including Annie Cheney’s Body Brokers and Kathy Braidhill’s Chop Shop.
Q: Tell us about Maggie O’Dell. Where did the inspiration for her character come from, and is she based on a real life person?
A: I never proposed for Maggie to be a series character, so she’s had to evolve and reveal herself to me with each novel. In the beginning with A Perfect Evil Maggie was a tough, young FBI agent driven much more by impulse and passion. She’s matured a bit, though still driven to do the right thing. I reflect Maggie’s a lot more long-suffering of who she is and less apologetic of how she goes about doing her job.
She’s not, but, based on any one person and although she and I share some personality traits–our unintentional abuse of fine leather shoes and our like of college football–Maggie’s certainly not my alter ego. For one thing she’s much more courageous than I am.
Q: Critics and fans alike have establish your heroine, Special Agent Maggie O’Dell, very appealing. What is it about her that readers can’t get enough of?
A: I have to admit I’m not sure what it is, because sometimes Maggie drives me crazy. What I hear from readers is they like that Maggie’s not a superhero. They can tell to her. Yes, she might be an brilliant profiler but she failed at her marriage and struggles with her personal relationships. She has flaws. She makes mistakes. But the bottom line is that Maggie does the right thing even when it’s not the simple thing, even when it gets her in distress or puts her in danger. I reflect readers admire that about her.
Q: What’s next? Can you give us a preview of your next novel, and will we see more of Maggie O’Dell?
A: Maggie will be back in Hotwire. Her boss sends her to the Midwest to investigate cattle mutilations in the area and Maggie stumbles upon a bizarre triple murder of some local teenagers.
(Alex Kava Photo © Deborah Groh Carlin)
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Hurricane Isaac has not reached the Florida peninsular yet, but impacts the waves in the Gulf. Off of Pensacola, Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Wilson orders AST 3 Liz Bailey to investigate what looks like a floating fisherman’s cooler. Although she is allowed to decline the dive as her mission is to rescue people not artifacts, she dives into the rough water. She completes the treacherous mission; inside the large container is a human foot.
FBI profiler Maggie O’Dell is sent to the Gulf to investigate the foot; Department of Homeland Security deputy director Charlie Wurth joins her while a forensics team matches the limb to missing Vince Coffland, who disappeared from Port St. Lucie during a hurricane. At the same time O’Dell works the foot case, her boyfriend, Colonel Benjamin Platt is also in Florida investigating a deadly bacteria killing soldiers in hospitals. The cases collide at the funeral parlor owned by O’Dell’s brother-in-law Scott Larsen whom Joe Black pays to preserve harvested body parts.
This is a terrific law enforcement thriller in which the scenes of the sea rescues occurs while a hurricane is impact down (mindful if Irwin Allen TV movies) on the coast supersedes the actions of the heroine and her two investigative hunks. The tale line is quick-paced from the moment Bailey dives into the water and never slows down, as she and her teammates steal the show. Readers will delight in this exhilarating confrontation with Hurricane Isaac and a body parts reaper as the entreating thriller ends with a strong stunning twist.
Harriet Klausner
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I really loved this book and read it in a few days. If you read any of Alex Kava’s previous books you will delight in this one. Same characters and the same fantastic plot!
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
The inscription of a excellent thriller are suspense, excitement, and the unexpected. This tale has all three. Maggie O’Dell is an FBI Special Agent sent to Pensacola, Florida, to investigate the finding by the US Coast Guard of a container of body parts floating in the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, Colonel Benjamin Platt, a medical doctor and legendary practiced on communicable diseases, arrives from Fort Detrick, Maryland, to investigate the unexplained deaths of a number of patients in the military hospital at Pensacola. We also meet an undertaker who is puzzled by rotting odors coming from his clean cooler. As the investigations proceed, murders in Pensacola and deaths at the hospital continue, and more body parts appear. Towering over everything is the approach of Hurricane Isaac. All of these happenings come together in an exciting climax. The writing is quick-paced, and the book is well-worth reading.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
As the tale opens, it is simple to judge that the leader has included too many plotlines, there are jumps from one character to another and initially it is a bit confusing. But, once enough background has been customary, it all closes up rather quickly and with the power of the heel of a hand to your chest. It involves bodies snatched for parts, a female Coast Guard rescue swimmer, a shoddy funeral director, a female FBI agent (Maggie O’Dell), agents of Homeland Security, an unknown and extremely deadly disease that is infecting American soldiers that underwent bone surgery, several additional minor players and one huge hurricane. All of this is tied together into a coherent and logically consistent tale that will keep your hands wrapped around the pages until all of them are in your left hand.
The setting is Florida and the tale opens with the rescue swimmer retrieving a large cooler from the ocean. It seems to be a routine and perhaps even trivial event until the agents open the cooler and find severed body parts. This starts an investigation that involves many aspects of modern medical forensics as several agencies of law enforcement are involved in the tracking process.
While all this is happening, a category five hurricane named Isaac is impact down on their area of Florida, so time is of the essence. In a dramatic climactic scene, Maggie is able to overcome one of her greatest fears and arrives just in time to take down the terrible guy.
Once I ongoing reading, I could not place it down, so engrossed that I nearly forgot to pick my daughter up at a graduation party and I have never been late alternative her up from anything.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I have read nearly all of Alex Kava’s books and find that she permanently writes appealing, engrossing mysteries. DAMAGED is a fantastic addition to her Maggie O’Dell series.
I had anticipated not be able to follow some of the background in this book, since I have not yet read the last book in the series , BLACK SUNDAY, and while I usually reflect it’s a excellent thought to have read the previous books in any series, it really is not necessary here. Kava writes in a very “cut-to-the-chase” style, not bogging done the tale with a fantastic deal of unnecessary description (ala Sue Grafton.) She provides just enough to keep the reader interested and moves the tale along at a nice pace.
The plot of DAMAGED is appealing and unique – a serial killer who kills in order to sell body parts for profit, and why not throw in a pending hurricane just to up the tension level a small. The tale ends well, although a bit unsettling. I’m looking forwards to the next book in the series.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5