The Straw Men by Michael Marshall

 

Two men walk into a fast food restaurant and start firing.  A man goes to his childhood home in Montana to bury his parents who were killed in a car crash.  While packing up the house to get it ready to sell, he finds a hidden note from his father, telling him that he and the mother are not dead.  In California, a serial killer known as The Upright Man is abducting teenage girls, then delivering purses to their parents with the girl's name embroidered on it in the hair of a former victim.

There are those who are searching for these killers.  Some from the FBI, some former CIA agents.  In California, a former policeman works the case after his own daughter is one of the victims.  As the cases evolve, they start to come together from across the country and so do those who search for The Straw Men.

Michael Marshall is a new author for me and this book was so chilling and compelling that I immediately upon completion went out and starting buying up his backlist.  Marshall writes with so much imagination yet the details of deaths are not gory as some books are.  The terror is hinted at rather than forced upon the reader.  All the separate cases satisfactorily come together in the end as do all those committed to finding and stopping the Straw Men.  This book is recommended for readers of crime fiction.