Burning Time

A serial killer leaves a college coed to die in the California desert, his signature of fire seared into her flesh.... A beautiful Chinese-American detective, recently transferred from Chinatown to the Upper West Side, is assigned a routine missing-persons case... A famous doctor returns home from a lecture to discover that his actress wife has been living a secret life.... Now, the paths of the cop, the killer, and the psychiatrist are about to converge.... A savage killer is on the loose in New York City.  His calling card is a tattoo of flames; his trail of victims leads from the scorched sands of Californa to the blistering heart of Manhattan. Only Detective April Woo can block this vicious madman's next move.  And with the help of psychiatrist Jason Frank, this NYPD policewoman will prove that the predator she's hunting is no ordinary killer--but then, April Woo is no ordinary cop. From the Paperback edition. From Publishers Weekly All superficial characterization and sadism, this thriller about a serial killer, its plot founded entirely on coincidence, is charmless in the extreme. When a man and a woman show up at NYPD headquarters to file a missing persons report on their college-age daughter, detective April Woo does the paperwork. Woo eventually learns that California cops have found the daughter's apparently fire-branded body near San Diego. Shortly thereafter, a New York psychiatrist approaches Woo with several disturbing letters sent to his porno-star wife. The letters have a San Diego postmark, prompting Woo to connect them with the murderer (3000 miles away, but not for long.) Horrific, if predictable, descriptions of the pyromaniac killer and his methods of torture are interspersed with updates on Woo's investigation. Glass ( To Do No Harm ) attempts a multicultural angle by casting Woo as a Chinese-American in conflict with her old-fashioned immigrant mother, but the tension between them is hackneyed at best. From its farfetched premise to its suspenseless action-drama climax, the novel is a chore to wade through.