Special Agent Kimberly Quincy has moved to the Atlanta Office of the FBI; her husband Mac is with the Georgia Crime Bureau of Investigation. She is five months pregnant and is assigned to the Evidence Response Team, taking her out of the high risk encounters she has been involved with in other novels.

A pregnant prostitute, Delilah Rose, is arrested in an Atlanta suburb and claims to be a snitch of Kimberly’s. Cross-jurisdictional cooperation gets Kimberly to the scene and she realizes she has never seen this person before. Delilah claims her good friend Ginny Jones, a prostitute and nine or ten others have disappeared from the Atlanta area. She describes a man known to her as Drinchara who is an obsessed collector of spiders, and who utilizes them in his myriad of sex games. The GBI officer, Sal, who made the contact with her, had been the recipient (under his windshield) of a collection of driver's licenses of hookers that seem to be missing.

These girls could be easily dismissed as kids who just moved on looking for a richer city to ply their trade, but Delilah gives Kimberly a class ring she had found in Drinchara's car that her friend Ginny had never been without. Tracing that down, Kimberly finds the original male owner of the ring was the victim of an unsolved murder.

Uneasily beginning to suspect that Delilah might be partially telling the truth, Kimberly begins to investigate and teams with Sal. Neither the FBI nor Mac wants Kimberly to be doing any of this: the FBI – because without corpses they regard it as a waste of time and Mac – because he fears it isn't.

The reader meets the "Burgerman" early when he abducts a very young boy and makes him his slave in every capacity. The results of the abuse are truly incalculable but manifestations of it begin rearing their ugly head early on in this story.

As for Drinchara, his life is his poisonous spider collection and his use of them clearly extends beyond his sex games to something much darker, as his favorite trick seems to be making his current murder victim chose the next prey, always being careful to make certain that person is the one most beloved to the victim.

It soon becomes apparent that Kimberly has been targeted and she is armed only with a general description and the abiding conviction that Drinchara may indeed be a serial killer of prostitutes. The pace begins to quicken and the plots begin to merge. Toward the end of the novel the reader will foolishly believe he is prepared for anything, but the story will keep evolving naturally into a truly mind blowing ending that one absolutely can not see coming.

There are so many things that are right about Say Goodbye, that one can even forgive Gardner for the constant reminders of all the poisonous spiders in the world, human and non- human. Say Goodbye is an incredibly compelling read but may not be a pleasurable one for many readers.

--Thea Davis