FBI Special Agent Jillian Maxwell has been preoccupied by this killer for almost two years, and recently he has been taunting her by sending postcards. The latest indicates to her that he will be operating in the east coast area of Ocean City, Maryland.

Jillian has persuaded her boss to let her work out of that area for this investigation and asks for Reed Donovan to be assigned to her team. In him she meets a sexy, bright widowed father of two sons. He has some emotional baggage, but not even close to hers.

Jillian witnessed her father kill her mother at age four and believes that she then killed her father. Her life in foster homes started then, and she bounced from one to another in increasing fits of rage and aberrant behavior, until she met the woman who turned her life around. This early childhood left her with a pretty severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder, and one does wonder how she cleared the FBI psychological profiling.

Christian Shepherd has rented a beach cottage in Ocean City, but loses control when he happens upon a young girl on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and spontaneously kills her. He is distressed that he permitted himself to depart from his game plan, which includes killing Jillian. French portrays him as a man close to the edge, characterized by moods that swing from the sublime to the utter ridiculous. When the young girl's remains surface, Jillian knows she is right, and that Christian is near.

French does a very credible job of character development, with Reed emerging as the most stable of the key players. The action bounces from one location to another with a short stint in Europe. The author uses these scene changes effectively to keep adding dimensions to the characters. The dialog is crisp where it should be and bizarre in other places to reinforce her points.

A predictable romance ignites between Reed and Jillian as they slog through old case notes in this bizarre yet very original plot. There is yet another voice in this serpentine story, which one knows merely as a competitor to Christian for the dubious title of Number One in the serial killer business.  The ending is logical, but is one that is very hard to see coming.

Judith French is an entertaining author, being both very imaginative and very technically talented and suspense novel readers will find much to enjoy in Blood Sport.

--Thea Davis