Hannah Doyle (not her real name) is a clerk in the video store, and supporting a small son on the meager pay. She is in fact a fugitive from an abusive husband, with outstanding warrants for kidnapping her own son, theft and forgery. At some financial sacrifice Hannah is also attending community college and presently enrolled in a film class.

The story opens as a man is having sex with Rae Palmer. Unknown to her, there are two concealed video cameras documenting the event. The real purpose of the cameras is to film her stabbing death. The film is professionally edited, and the killer is blurred or portrayed in shadows.

Some time later, this video appears in the unexplained return box of the Emerald City Video Store. As a matter of course Hannah takes the video home to examine it to determine what to do with it. When she views the video it is eerily familiar. She keeps telling herself it can not be real, as the scene too closely resembles the death scene in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

After a couple calming drinks Hannah goes to bed; the killer switches the tape so when she shows it to her boss the next day, it isn’t there.

In the course of one workday, in front of a group of people at the store, a customer is abusive to Hannah. Later, she receives a tape of Rosemary’s Baby, and even later, the customer falls from her apartment window, in the same fashion as the death scene in that movie.

Hannah begins to realize that she is targeted to preview or review deaths. Suddenly the men she associates with as customers, co-workers and her professor and fellow class members in her film class become suspects. Since she is a fugitive, involving the police is not a wise idea.

The author spends perhaps too little time in character development, devoting page space to the many movies and scenes recreated. Whether or not he intentionally left his males shadowy is debatable but it does add to the suspense of the story.

The pace is slow, notwithstanding the murders; scene changes are abrupt and the reader is left with a choppy read. The dialogue is predictable and the interaction of the characters is unremarkable.

Nonetheless, Watch Them Die has an intriguing and very well constructed plot. Whether art imitates life, or life imitates art is definitely the question.

--Thea Davis