Welcome to Torrance, Florida. Population: 4,160. As Sheriff John Weber would attest, the deadliest predators to date in his tiny hamlet were the alligators lurking in the nearby swamps. But that was before someone abducted and murdered a runaway teenage girl...and before the disappearance of popular and pretty Liana Martin. The pattern is chilling to Sandy Crosbie, the town's new high school English teacher. With a marriage on the rocks, thanks to her husband's online affairs, and a beautiful teenage daughter to protect, Sandy wishes she'd never come to the seemingly quiet town with shocking depths of scandal, sex, and brutality roiling beneath its surface. And as Sheriff Weber digs up more questions than answers in a dead-end investigation, one truth emerges: the prettiest ones are being targeted, the heartstoppers. And this killer intends to give them their due....
Alternating between the chilling journal entries of a cold-blooded murderer and the sizzling scandals of small-town life, Heartstopper is Joy Fielding's most exciting novel of suspense yet.
Someone is stalking and killing pretty young girls in tiny Torrance, Florida. From entries in the killer's journal, listeners learn the townspeople's secrets, experience the horror of the kidnapped girls, and glimpse the pathology that inspires the murders. Judith West has a field day portraying the quirky characters in Fielding's latest thriller. She is best as Sandy Crosbie, high school English teacher, whose handsome husband has left her for a surgically enhanced "Barbie clone" he met online. West is also credible as the various high school students, from Goths to jocks, from tormented teens to privileged princesses. While she is less successful with the oddball assortment of teachers, making them more stereotyped than realistic, she's positively chilling when reading from the killer's journal. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Joy Fielding is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Heartstopper, Mad River Road, See Jane Run, and other acclaimed novels. She divides her time between Toronto and Palm Beach, Florida. Visit her website at www.JoyFielding.com.
