Mortal Fear

By day, Harper Cole works as a commodities trader and at night he leads quite a different life, serving as a systems operator for an exclusive erotic online service that caters to the rich and famous. But a stranger has now penetrated the network's state-of-the-art security, brutally murdering six celebrated female clients. Falsely accused of these horrible crimes, Harper realizes he must lure an elusive madman into the open--and place everything he holds dear directly in the killer's path!

Amazon.com Review

Raymond Chandler once proclaimed that the first-person narrator should never turn out to be the villain in a good mystery or thriller. Luckily, the excellent writer Greg Iles has seemingly ignored Chandler's advice. Iles has created a character--Harper Cole, a futures trader and online pornographer--who could very well be the person killing off subscribers to his Internet sex service. Or is it Miles Turner, Cole's very odd colleague? If you thought that stalking a killer on the Internet had been done to death in books and bad movies, this one will have you pushing the reload button on your browser.

From Publishers Weekly

Yet another serial killer stalks the Internet, this one courtesy of the talented Iles (Black Cross; Spandau Phoenix). When futures trader Harper Cole, who moonlights as the systems operator of an erotic online services called EROS, contacts the New Orleans police with information about the murder of celebrated author-and EROS subscriber-Karin Wheat, he immediately becomes the prime suspect in six other murders of EROS subscribers across the country. Also on the FBI's short list is Cole's eccentric friend and EROS colleague Miles Turner, who has dubbed the killer "Brahma." When Cole learns that the man he thought was Brahma was killed a year ago and that his online identity was stolen, a tense cat-and-mouse game commences. Professional hunters, like FBI psychiatric profiler Arthur Lenz, have the online tables turned on them time and again by an insanely brilliant murderer, and it's up to Cole to render justice. His digging leads to an exciting payoff when he goes online and poses as a potential victim, using as bait a secret that endangers the mother of his child, as well as his wife. While Cole's obsession over this guilty secret makes him less than likable at times, a nailbiting climax erases any doubts about his character-and any lingering questioning about the storytelling abilities of Iles, who here uses rich first-person narration and clever plotting to tell a sizzler of a thriller.