The 9th Girl by Tami Hoag

The 9th Girl by Tami Hoag

Kovac had seen more dead bodies than he could count: men, women, children; victims of shootings, stabbings, strangulations, beatings; fresh corpses and bodies that had been left for days in the trunks of cars in the dead of summer. But he had never seen anything quite like this.

On a frigid New Year's Eve in Minneapolis, a young woman's brutalized body falls from the trunk of a car into the path of oncoming traffic. Questions as to whether she was alive or dead when she hit the icy pavement result in her macabre nickname, Zombie Doe. Unidentified and unidentifiable, she is the ninth nameless female victim of the year, and homicide detectives Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska are charged with the task of not only finding out who Zombie Doe is but who in her life hated her enough to destroy her. Was it personal, or could it just have been a crime of opportunity? Their greatest fear is that not only is she their ninth Jane Doe of the year but that she may be the ninth victim of a vicious, transient serial killer they have come to call Doc Holiday.

Crisscrossing America's heartland, Doc Holiday chooses his victims at random, snatching them in one city and leaving them in another, always on a holiday. If Zombie Doe is one of his victims, he has brought his gruesome game to a new and more terrifying level. But as Kovac and Liska begin to uncover the truth, they will find that the monsters in their ninth girl's life may have lived closer to home. And even as another young woman disappears, they have to ask the question: Which is the greater evil--the devil you know or the devil you don't?

TAMI HOAG is the best-selling novelist in the world, with over thirty volumes to her credit. Her books have been translated into over 30 languages and have sold over 38 million copies. Hoag is known for merging exhilarating stories with character-driven suspense. Her first novel, Night Sins, debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, and each of her subsequent works has been a success. She resides in the state of Florida.