Swallowtail

A Massachusetts detective investigates the possible reemergence of the serial killer she once escaped in this sturdy procedural from Ross (Half in Love with Death). In 1994, 16-year-old Samantha Star and her friend Bridget McGann were abducted after accepting a ride from a male stranger in Quincy, Mass. Detective Brian O’Neil managed to rescue Samantha, but not before Bridget was stabbed to death by the girls’ abductor, who left a yellow butterfly “on the ribbon of blood that separated her head from her body.” Bridget’s killer then went on to murder a string of other women and place butterflies on their corpses, earning him the nickname “the butterfly killer.” Twenty years later, Samantha has become O’Neil’s partner on the Quincy police force. When a friend of her daughter’s is found with a bashed-in skull and a blue butterfly on her throat, Samantha and O’Neil fear that the butterfly killer has returned—but their boss and the mayor pressure the detectives to prove that it’s the work of a copycat. Ross doesn’t reinvent the wheel, slickly executing rather than subverting the well-established tropes of the serial killer thriller. She maintains plenty of nerve-shredding tension, however, and makes her lead’s trauma palpable. This gets the job done. (Nov.)