In Erica Spindler’s The Last Victim, hurricane Katrina’s devastation takes on psychotic dimensions when disembodied hands are found in an abandoned refrigerator in New Orleans’ refrigerator graveyards.
Who would commit this sick act? All signs point to the murderous work of a serial killer dubbed The Handyman.
In an already decimated police force, finding the killer becomes personal for embittered Captain Patti O’Shay, whose husband, another captain in the same department, was killed during the storm by looters. And now, two years after the storm, her husband's badge and handless remains have been found in a shallow grave.
Question is: is the Handyman still active? Or even alive? Was he lost or killed in the storm? Or was he relocated?
Spindler, who has spent much of her adult life in New Orleans, became fascinated by the refrigerator graveyards that erupted after the storm. “When we left, our refrigerators were fully stocked. But when the power went out, the food went bad and people came home from the storm weeks later to these refrigerator nightmares,” she says.
Most people duck-taped them shut and rolled them out to the street but the appliances were considered environmental hazards because of the Freon.
“The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took the refrigerators to dump sites and lined them up like tombstones,” says Spindler. “They cleaned them out one by one. One dump site had 30,000 refrigerators.”
“I started to imagine,” says Spindler. “What if they opened one up and found the unimaginable—severed hands—the result of a serial killer.”
Erica Spindler has written a dozen thrillers and twenty-five books. She is a New York Times, USA Today, Waldenbooks and Amazon.com bestselling author. The Last Victim is her first novel set in post-Katrina New Orleans and features some of the characters that appeared in Killer Takes All. Click here for The Last Victim casebook file give-away and other Spindler goodies.
