Newspaper reporter Jack Flynn, last seen in McGrory's Dead Line (2004), investigates a series of contemporary murders that parallel the terrifying Boston Strangler slayings of the 1960s in the author's less than convincing fourth thriller. Somewhat improbably, Flynn must begin by probing the older case and the debate over whether the confessed strangler, Albert DeSalvo, was actually guilty. In the novel's reality, the senior Bay State senator isn't Ted Kennedy but a prosecutor who made his reputation on the DeSalvo case and who's among many in law enforcement discouraging Flynn from re-examining the official line that DeSalvo was the murderer. The sympathetic Flynn, with his train wreck of a private life, compensates for the author not probing more deeply serious questions about the real-life strangler case. Those seeking a rich, compelling look at the possible return of a serial killer would do better to turn to Peter Straub's Blue Rose and its sequels

A warning by an anonymous caller that "nothing is as it seems" sets reporter Jack Flynn on the trail of the truth, a trail that takes him first to a militia compound in Idaho and then to a workingman's bar in Boston before he realizes that the answers are hidden much closer to home. The flaws in the plot are even more glaring considering the paeans to investigative journalism and its heroes with which McGrory seasons his narrative. It wouldn't have taken Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein 10 minutes of telephone research to conclude what the author requires three-quarters of a novel to figure out. But in an election year when the candidates compete to see who can put the voters to sleep first, The Incumbent may whet the appetites of a few political junkies