The Holy Kiss

Move over Clarice! Meet Detective Shantelle "Stevie" Sanchez who wonders why, at age 33, she's in Jersey City, why she's a cop, why the dream won't go away.and why do men kill women? Another snag is the only man who doesn't repulse her is older, married and a computer cop. In a piercing psychological portrait, this obsessive detective probes the mind of a serial killer who has murdered four black women. They are discovered dangling "like sides of beef" in the 100-year-old subway tubes under the Hudson River. Each has a lip shape and cross burned into her torso. In a discordant mix of history, forensics, profiling, and betrayal, a Task Force works to solve the killings. Stevie impulsively places herself in peril by entering the menacing tunnels to find the killer. The "computer cop" who heads the Task Force overcomes a haunting fear of tunnels born in Viet Nam and follows her. In the subterranean dankness beneath Manhattan, they confront their own frailties as they face the killer's "Holy Kiss" of death in a taunt, tingling and unpredictable end game amidst the 600-volt "hot" rails.
Praise for The Holy Kiss

"After this book, I didn't take the subways for a month."

-Peter Golenbock, best-selling author of The Bronx Zoo.

"Characters so real, I began locking my doors."

-Psychologist Dr C. Ringold, Psy.D

"Convincing and engrossing from page one!"

Detective J. Vecchio, NYPD, Ret




"Wightman takes standard-issue police-thriller conventions and amplifies them to lurid extremes: The ethnic tensions are more strident, the turf battles between rival police agencies more cutthroat, the scheming of shadowy power-brokers more baroque, the media vultures more cynical, the motivating psycho-sexual perversions more explicit. But the author makes his overdrawn characters both vivid and sympathetic, and tells their story vigorously." -Kirkus Discoveries