Author:  Ted Dekker
Title:  The Bride Collector
Publisher: Center Street

New York Times best-selling author Ted Dekker probes the troubled minds of a delusional killer—and the flawed cop who's tracking him down in The Bride Collector, his latest novel from Center Street Press. The result? Dekker assembles a surprisingly deep, disturbing, and insightful thriller that lurks in the shadows between genius and insanity.

Brad Raines is a crack agent at the FBI bureau in Denver. Meticulous and precise, Agent Raines is known for his obsessive pursuit of justice as he solves the cases others can't crack. Raines is on the fast track for success as one of the agency's rising young stars. But it's not ambition that drives the sharp and suave cop—it's a deep emotional pain that leaves him brooding just below his calm exterior.

That calm exterior starts to crack when Raines is called in to face his toughest case yet—a string of strange, almost ritual murders popping up in the Colorado countryside. The killer is every bit as precise as the man trying to track him down. Every murder scene is clean. No evidence is left. The only insight into the murder's mind is the bridal veil he leaves behind to mark his kills. This unusual trademark earns the serial killer the name "The Bride Collector."

As Raines attempts to enter into the world of this cold-blooded genius, the troubled agent must wrestle with the secret he's never told anyone—and lingering questions about his own sanity.

Quinton Gauld is that cold-blooded genius. He is handsome, well dressed, and brilliant. And he believes he's sent from God to usher beautiful women into his presence. The mind of this calculating hunter is in the tradition of A Beautiful Mind—but one filled with dark, twisted thoughts. While Raines and his fellow detectives scamper across Denver tracking down clues, Quinton stays two steps ahead of the law with his own brand of logic.

Out of ideas, Raines turns to an unlikely band of brilliant psychiatric patients for help. One of these patients—a woman named Paradise—holds the key to the case, and to Raines' troubled heart. Meanwhile, the killings continue and Quinton gets ever closer to "collecting" what Raines loves most.

Dekker has assembled a suspenseful thriller in The Bride Collector. Pages turn quickly as he builds complex characters the reader grows to care about inside a nail-biting plot framework that keeps you perched precariously on the edge of your seat. Dekker fans say The Bride Collector is perhaps his best novel yet—and they just might be right. From start to finish, he is in control and taunts the reader with mercilessly scanty reveals on page after page.

Dekker shines brightest when he crawls inside the brilliant and helplessly bent minds of his flawed characters. Their streams of thought are vivid, scattered, disturbing—and extraordinary.  Quinton's rationalizations about his murderous actions are confusing and troubling, yet somehow make sense. Dekker's portrayal of mental illness and his ability to use it as an asset in the suspense pulls The Bride Collector together while at the same time threatens to rend it apart at the seams.

The detail and realism Dekker applies to his characters' disturbed mental states is also applied to the disturbing killings at the center of the book's storyline. Icky and creepy come with the territory in the suspense-thriller genre, but The Bride Collector ramps up the depictions a notch further than what some readers may expect. Dekker doesn't resort to pure shock value in his novel, but let's just say that some of the passages in The Bride Collector may not be lunchtime reading material.

If flawed characters, deep conflict and an astounding journey into the blurry line between genius and insanity are on your list for "Mr. Right," then you'll want to say "I do" to Ted Dekker and The Bride Collector.


**This review first published on May 4, 2010.